Realism has traditionally, albeit variously, been conceived through explicit attention to detail, the representation of individual experience, or the attempt to depict ‘objective’ reality. Yet, since the Enlightenment, realisms have struggled to cohere into any single framework, negotiating the desire for faithful representation with a simultaneous desire to imbue the ordinary with transcendent meaning. How might realism be reformulated when looked at from the perspective of ‘the visionary,’ ‘spirituality,’ ‘(re)enchantment,’ and the ‘supernatural’? How might extant theories of realism change through an attention to the more-than – even impossibly – real? 

This seminar invites explorations into how literary and cultural forms grapple with an evolving and often overlooked relationship between realism and that which attempts to exceed it. Such excesses are apparent from the first stirrings of English literary realism, from Daniel Defoe’s ghost stories to George Eliot’s conviction that there should be “men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things…and delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven falls on them.” The desire to heighten the real – toward the uncanny, the transcendent, the epiphanic – attunes us to Mark Fisher’s observation that what is at first “presented as necessary and inevitable” is no more than “a mere contingency.” Bound up with desires for the spiritual, transcendent, and enchantment in the everyday, realism has struggled with its own professed epistemological motivations, traditionally conceived as objectivity and rationality. This seminar proposes that “realism” is a useful categorical distinction insofar as it provides a necessary background against which the more-than-real can become legible.

Realism, it’s clear, has its discontents. How do the aesthetic parameters of realism permit or preclude representations of the unreal? How does the presence of the spiritual or visionary inform expectations of genre? Is it possible to take spirituality seriously in the context of realism? How does attention to spirituality and faith inform historically contingent definitions of “the real”? 

We invite paper proposals that engage with the aforementioned questions. Possible topics include:

• The representation of mystical experiences in otherwise “realist” narratives 
• The role of belief in shaping character and plot 
• The aesthetics of the unseen
• The sacred and the profane in a pre- or post-secular world
• Indigenous spiritual practices and orientations
• Recent turns in Western society toward Traditionalist Catholicism, and other forms of faith and religion
• Realisms and the occult, astrology, numerology, magic, and witchcraft
• Psychedelia and altered states of awareness