Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

The Question of Realism

The Question of Realism in visual representations of the author. Through what is undoubtedly the best reading ever produced of Mr. and Mrs. Merdle, two minor characters in Dickens’s novel Little Dorrit, Novak establishes how Dickensian grotesques work through synecdoche to produce what the Marxist critic Georg Lukács calls “organic totality” rather than the bureaucratic totalization or rational systematization that Dickens criticizes so effectively through the Circumlocution Office. In George Eliot’s case, Novak compares Daniel Deronda to Francis Galton’s composite photographs of “model Jews” to show that the novelist’s strategy of making Deronda conform to a disembodied ideal Jewish type was not a representational failure but a radical way of achieving a greater realism than particularized description could provide. Finally, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is shown to celebrate the properly artistic body as a kind of posing or pastiche, largely through a contrast with inartistic posing and pastiche found in commercial models. The creation of a fictional or abstract body, which is paradoxically reproducible in the numerous photographs of Wilde himself, is an achievement that late-nineteenth-century aestheticism shares with some mid-Victorian realistic texts. Novak’s arguments about photography and realism overturn widely accepted assumptions. It is surprising to see photography characterized http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Novel: A Forum on Fiction Duke University Press

The Question of Realism

Clayton, Jay
Novel: A Forum on Fiction , Volume 44 (1) – Mar 1, 2011
Download PDF
3 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/duke-university-press/the-question-of-realism-bR5BrtYoh0

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2011 by Novel, Inc.
ISSN
0029-5132
eISSN
1945-8509
DOI
10.1215/00295132-1164518
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

in visual representations of the author. Through what is undoubtedly the best reading ever produced of Mr. and Mrs. Merdle, two minor characters in Dickens’s novel Little Dorrit, Novak establishes how Dickensian grotesques work through synecdoche to produce what the Marxist critic Georg Lukács calls “organic totality” rather than the bureaucratic totalization or rational systematization that Dickens criticizes so effectively through the Circumlocution Office. In George Eliot’s case, Novak compares Daniel Deronda to Francis Galton’s composite photographs of “model Jews” to show that the novelist’s strategy of making Deronda conform to a disembodied ideal Jewish type was not a representational failure but a radical way of achieving a greater realism than particularized description could provide. Finally, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is shown to celebrate the properly artistic body as a kind of posing or pastiche, largely through a contrast with inartistic posing and pastiche found in commercial models. The creation of a fictional or abstract body, which is paradoxically reproducible in the numerous photographs of Wilde himself, is an achievement that late-nineteenth-century aestheticism shares with some mid-Victorian realistic texts. Novak’s arguments about photography and realism overturn widely accepted assumptions. It is surprising to see photography characterized

Journal

Novel: A Forum on Fiction – Duke University Press

Published: Mar 1, 2011

There are no references for this article.