REALISM BITES
Eighth Biannual Graduate Student Conference of the German
Program
Department of German and Romance Languages and Literature at
the Johns Hopkins University
Realism Bites: Disruptive Realisms in Modernity
Keynote speakers:
Prof. Elisabeth Strowick, Johns Hopkins University
Prof. Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota
November 6- 7, 2015
The Johns Hopkins University
All the fissures and rents which are inherent in the
historical situation must be drawn into the form-giving process and cannot nor
should be disguised by compositional means.
(György Lukács, The Theory of the Novel)
The term realism has been associated with multiple artistic
practices, styles and movements from nineteenth-century bourgeois
realism to socialist realism, surrealism, Italian neorealism, magical
realism, and postmodern hyperrealism. Its repetitions and invocations
express a commitment to and a struggle for reality, rearticulating the
political, social and epistemological functions and meanings of art. As a form
of "Darstellung der Wirklichkeit," it carries the tension of a set of
oppositions: the reality that is and the reality
that ought to be; an objective and verisimilar reproduction and a
poetic constitution of reality; a conventional mode and personal expression of
reality.
György Lukács
emphasized the necessity for a “critical realism,” one that is determined by a
critical perception and mediation of social contradictions, rather than their
naïve reproduction. The notion of unity, so important for the Lukácsian concept
of ‘critical realism,’ refers not only to the realist novel’s capacity to
reveal the totality of social relations, but also to its depiction of the
individual’s striving to reach totality as a mode of being. Even though, Lukács
considered the novel as the primary form for the critical depiction of the
modern conditio humana, the question can be raised whether “critical
realism” functions more as an epistemo-critical concept than as a rigid genre
definition. Since Lukács, many scholars and artists have called into question
his notion of totality and human agency, and contested h is definition of art
as a representational medium that reveals a social totality. Should we, as
Fredric Jameson has suggested, hold on to a concept of totality, when discussing
current “problems of realism?” How do the various forms of realism relate to
what Lukács - justifiably or not – has identified as the pseudo-objectivity of
Naturalism, on the one hand, and extreme subjectivism, on the other? Can one
actualize critical realisms for a critique of representation? And in what way
do contemporary reassessments and actualizations of realisms repeat or reverse
traditional dichotomies, such as those between idealism and realism, nominalism
and realism, realism and modernism?
This call for paper invites submissions from a wide variety
of disciplines that discuss competing aesthetic strategies. Presentations
should not exceed 20 minutes.
Please submit abstracts (300-500 words) with your name
and affiliation to Esther Edelmann and Christiane Ketteler at realismbitesgermangrads@gmail.com by
August 13, 2015.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
· * Realism repeated: Realism after Modernism
· * Avant-garde "realities"
· * Antinomies and instabilities within classical
realisms
· * The reception of realisms and its historical
conditions
· * Realisms, political movements and alliances
· * Speculative Realism and the constitution and
emergence of objects
· * Excessive Realism or new possibilities of
perceptions of objects
· * Productive realisms or the emergence of new
orders
· * Realisms (false) friends: Reportage, Travelogue,
and Documentary
· * The Real and the Reality Principle
· * Capitalist Realism and the limits and problems
in representing global capitalism and its alternatives
· * Theories and Projects of Mapping
· * Hyperrealism and the Desert of the Real / The
Spectacle of Reality
· * Abject Realisms and the abjected within Realism
· * Realism and the Dissolutions of boundaries
between the arts
· * Realism, Nominalism, Idealism, (New) Materialism
· * Realism, Romanticism, Symbolism
·
Post/Colonial Realisms
· * Feminist Realism
· * Realism and the Problem of Exemplarity
· * “Wirklichkeit als das Wirkende”
***END***
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