The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism

by Mary K. Holland

Overview

Literature has never looked weirder--full of images, colors, gadgets, and footnotes, and violating established norms of character, plot, and narrative structure. Yet over the last 30 years, critics have coined more than 20 new "realisms" in their attempts to describe it.


What makes this decidedly unorthodox literature "realistic"? And if it is, then what does "realism" mean anymore?

Examining literature by dozens of writers, and over a century of theory and criticism about realism, The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism sorts through the current critical confusion to illustrate how our ideas about what is real and how best to depict it have changed dramatically, especially in recent years. Along the way, Mary K. Holland guides the reader on a lively tour through the landscape of contemporary literary studies--taking in metafiction, ideology, posthumanism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism--with forays into quantum mechanics, new materialism, and Buddhism as well, to give us entirely new ways of viewing how humans use language to make sense of--and to make--the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501362620
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	07/09/2020
Pages:	312
Sales rank:	916,507
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Mary K. Holland is Professor of English at The State University of New York, New Paltz, USA. She is the author of Succeeding Postmodernism: Language and Humanism in Contemporary American Literature (Bloomsbury 2013) and co-editor, with Stephen J. Burn, of Approaches to Teaching David Foster Wallace (2019).

Table of Contents

List of Figures viii

Acknowledgments ix

Preface: The Problem of "Realism" xii

Introduction: A Brief History of Realisms 1

1 Metafictive Realism: David Foster Wallace and the Future of (Meta)Fiction 49

2 The Work of Art after the Mechanical Age: Materiality, Narrative, and the Real in the Fiction of Steve Tomasula 79

3 Material Realism and New Materialism: Literature from the 1990s to the Present 109

4 Quantum Realism: On Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" and Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being 151

5 Quantum Realism Case Study: On Don DeLillo's The Body Artist 191

Conclusion: Realism and Periodizing after Postmodernism 251

Bibliography 261

Index 278

Editorial Reviews

The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism radically and fruitfully upends all the critical truisms about realism(s), bringing both sanity and clarity to central literary and literary historical periodizing debates. By bringing together all the relevant theory, astute, insightful criticism, and, most significantly, innovative literary practice, it blows open all totalizing models of language/narrative/'real' world relations to theorize the fiction written in our twenty-first century 'reality.' This is an acutely analytic, intellectually generous, meticulously researched book that puts metafiction in its (real) place.
Linda Hutcheon, University Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of Toronto, Canada, and author of Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (1980)

Imagine a novel as an object in the world: not the imaginative dream that readers are normally invited to get lost in, but a novel with a body that has to be confronted. As Mary Holland argues, contemporary understandings of the world, and the Material Turn in philosophical concepts of the human and of nature, have also energized the 21st century novel--a conceptual pivot as fundamental as the turn to psychology or language during the modern or postmodern periods. Cultural sea changes so profound that they drive a rethinking of all the arts occur only once or twice in a generation: The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism is an exciting, field-changing analysis of how today, the new-material novel revitalizes print through its entanglement with readers and the stuff of the world--and the consequences wrought by these new realisms.
Steve Tomasula, Professor of English, University of Notre Dame, USA, and author of VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002) and The Book of Portraiture (2006)

What is the realism that comes after postmodernism? Many critics of contemporary fiction have sought to answer this question, but none has had Mary Holland's encyclopedic mastery of the materials necessary to do so in a way that seems fully responsive to the possibilities of the novel in our time. This book works on many levels: as a useful primer on what "realism" has meant in U.S. literature from the 19th century to the present; as a dazzlingly sure-handed tour of recent turns in the dialectic of experimental fiction that have pressed the term on our attention again; as an eloquent case for the ethical implications of all of our attempts to know what reality really is.
Mark McGurl, Albert Guérard Professor of Literature, Stanford University, USA, and author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2011)

From the Publisher