Repression and Realism in Postwar American Literature 1945-1955

<p>This thesis focuses on the uncanny in literature produced in America during the first decade following World War II. The period between 1945 and 1955 was marked by repressive socio-political forces such as McCarthyism and cultural conformity which complicated the representation of what Philip Roth refers to as "demonic reality." I explore the ways in which the avoidance and minimisation of the unpleasant created a highly circumscribed version of postwar American life while also generating a sense of objectless anxiety. According to the theories of Sigmund Freud, repression inevitably stages a return registered as the "uncanny." Animism, magic, the omnipotence of thoughts, the castration complex, death, the double, madness, involuntary repetition compulsion, live burial and haunting are all deemed capable of provoking a particular anxiety connected to what lies beneath the surface of accepted reality. Although it is common to argue that fantasy genres such as science fiction and gothic represent the return of what is repressed, this thesis explores several realist novels displaying uncanny characteristics. The realist novels included here are uncanny not only because they depict weird automaton-like characters, haunting, and castration anxieties, thus exhibiting a conscious use of Freudian theory, but because the texts themselves act as the return of the repressed. Norman Mailer referred to this unsettling phenomenon when he described writing as the "spooky" art; spooky because although a writer might sit down to consciously write a particular story, another unwilled story might very well appear.</p>

Repression and Realism in Postwar American Literature 1945-1955

<p>This thesis focuses on the uncanny in literature produced in America during the first decade following World War II. The period between 1945 and 1955 was marked by repressive socio-political forces such as McCarthyism and cultural conformity which complicated the representation of what Philip Roth refers to as "demonic reality." I explore the ways in which the avoidance and minimisation of the unpleasant created a highly circumscribed version of postwar American life while also generating a sense of objectless anxiety. According to the theories of Sigmund Freud, repression inevitably stages a return registered as the "uncanny." Animism, magic, the omnipotence of thoughts, the castration complex, death, the double, madness, involuntary repetition compulsion, live burial and haunting are all deemed capable of provoking a particular anxiety connected to what lies beneath the surface of accepted reality. Although it is common to argue that fantasy genres such as science fiction and gothic represent the return of what is repressed, this thesis explores several realist novels displaying uncanny characteristics. The realist novels included here are uncanny not only because they depict weird automaton-like characters, haunting, and castration anxieties, thus exhibiting a conscious use of Freudian theory, but because the texts themselves act as the return of the repressed. Norman Mailer referred to this unsettling phenomenon when he described writing as the "spooky" art; spooky because although a writer might sit down to consciously write a particular story, another unwilled story might very well appear.</p>

Precaritate și cosmopolitism în romanul românesc (1845-1947): muncă, hrană, sănătate, îmbrăcăminte, mondenitate

The present study dwells on an archive that includes around 85% of the Romanian production of novel from 1845 to 1947 and analyzes the social aspects of daily life in the fictional worlds of realist novels published in this timespan. From work conditions to the rights of employees, from hunger to bountifulness, from modesty to display, two different hemispheres seem to co-exist: a rustical and narrow one of the rural, liminal spaces, and a cosmopolitan and broad one of cities and mobility. Without a doubt, besides this spatial influence over daily life, an even more important one, that sometimes is complementary to the first and sometimes it overarches it is social class. In the mirrored image of the realist Romanian novel until 1947, there is nothing more consequential for individual and collective characters than class, and the differences between classes are closely linked to all dimensions of daily life described in our article.

Armed with Madness

Increased attention to psychology in the modern novel afforded expanded thematic access to aberrant states of consciousness. In a way, this returned the novel to its prototype in Don Quixote, and rejuvenated awareness of depicted mania in realist novels. Eight novels are profiled here (by Fowles, Fitzgerald, Lowry, Dostoyevsky, Canetti, Mann, Conrad, and Woolf) in order to examine narrative strategies for exploring madness, and implicating the reader’s consciousness as a participatory component of mental aberration. This approach counters Georg Lukács’s contention that depictions of mental aberration violated the novel’s obligation to depict normality. Modernism, he claimed, privileged distortion, but the novelists examined here suggest that the historical pressures of modernity provided distortions exceeding any particular imaginative license. These pressures are acutely rendered in portraits of domesticity in The Secret Agent by Conrad and Mrs Dalloway by Woolf, two among many such reckonings with geo-political trauma casting a shadow over private life.

May Sinclair

Chapter 2 extends the previous chapter’s inquiry into the relationship between realist aesthetics and figurative language as it might be oriented towards an unimaginable term—an unknowable, noumenal category—by considering its collision with what May Sinclair posits as its psychological equivalent, the unconscious. Sinclair combined a career as a novelist with philosophical research, mounting a vindication of neo-Hegelian idealist philosophy. For Sinclair, idealism’s impetus for thinking about immaterial and unseen realities led to the intangible and unseen realms of the mind, and a metaphysical absolute becomes the conduit for her early realist novels to begin to imagine a form for the uncertain boundaries and contours of consciousness. Both lack a verifiable content and are therefore apparently beyond the power of language to define or accommodate. This chapter suggests that the models of subjectivity presented in her fiction seek to integrate a revelatory encounter with an idealist absolute with the incontrovertible material evidence of alternative forms of consciousness being presented by the ‘new psychology’.

Realism, Form, and Representation in the Edwardian Novel

‘The real represents to my perception the things that we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another,’ wrote Henry James in 1907. This description, riven with double negatives, hesitation, and uncertainty, encapsulates the epistemological difficulties of realism, for underlying its narrative and descriptive apparatus as an aesthetic mode lies a philosophical quandary. What grounds the ‘real’ of the realist novel? What kind of perception is required to validate the experience of reality? How does the realist novel represent the difficulty of knowing? What comes to the fore in James’s account, as in so many, is how the forms of realism are constituted by a relation to unknowing, absence and ineffability. Realism, Form, and Representation in the Edwardian Novel recovers a neglected literary history centred on the intricate relationship between fictional representation and philosophical commitment. It asks how—or if—we can conceptualize realist novels when the objects of their representational intentions are realities that might exist beyond what is empirically verifiable by sense data or analytically verifiable by logic, and are thus irreducible to conceptual schemes or linguistic practices—a formulation Charlotte Jones refers to as ‘synthetic realism’. In new readings of Edwardian novels (including Conrad’s Nostromo and The Secret Agent, Wells’s Tono-Bungay, and Ford’s The Good Soldier), Jones revises and reconsiders key elements of realist novel theory—metaphor and metonymy; character interiority; the insignificant detail; omniscient narration and free indirect discourse; causal linearity—to uncover the representational strategies by which realist writers grapple with the recalcitrance of reality as a referential anchor, and seek to give form to the force, opacity, and uncertain scope of realities that may lie beyond the material. In restoring a metaphysical dimension to the realist novel’s imaginary, Realism, Form, and Representation in the Edwardian Novel offers a new conceptualisation of realism both within early twentieth-century literary culture and as a transhistorical mode of representation.

Decadence and Realism

This essay proposes a new understanding of the widely recognized disdain for realism and the realist novel among decadent writers, a disdain most critics have interpreted as a protomodernist celebration of artifice. Focusing on Oscar Wilde's dialogue “The Decay of Lying,” the essay argues instead that decadent antirealism is antimodern, embodying a repudiation of contemporary society. Decadent writers regard realism not as hidebound and traditional, as twentieth-century theorists would have it, but as terrifyingly modern. Wilde looks back to neoclassical theories of mimesis and classical Republican political theory to imagine a different, older world, one in which art improves upon brute reality and in which the artist stands apart from the social forces that realist novels make central to their literary universes.

Alchemical Cities, Apocalyptic Cities: The City as an Exponent of Magical Realism and Ideology in Angela Carter’s Novels

Reality in Angela Carter’s magical realist novels is depicted through the deployment of numerous picturesque details that correspond to the readers’ experiential reality, differentiating such a world from non-realist forms. Though the magical realist fictional world is akin to the one outside of the fictional reality, the mode’s strategy still differs from that of traditional realism due to the absence of a purely mimetic role. Initially serving to establish what Roland Barthes termed l’effet de reel (the effect of reality), the city in Carter’s novels is indeed constructed according to the principles of magical realism and creates plausible links between textual and extratextual realities. Further inclusion of magical, uncanny elements into such a world, in one respect, leads to the creation of excentric spaces that promote the position of the marginalized Other and allow alternative outlooks on life to gain prominence. A hybrid reality that is the ultimate result of the coexistence of the normal and the uncanny leads to the subversion of what Carter saw as patriarchal stereotypes, primarily due to the fact that it problematizes and ultimately negates their very foundation. In other words, if we cannot agree on the criteria for what is real, how can we trust the ultimate authority of any other criteria? The city in Carter’s novels thus acts as a suitable literary venue for revealing the author’s ideological position.

Drill, Baby, Drill: Extraction Ecologies, Open Temporalities, and Reproductive Futurity in the Provincial Realist Novel

The temporal structures of provincial realist novels set in extraction landscapes convey the new understanding of futurity that attended the nineteenth-century rise of an industrial system powered by a nonrenewable, diminishing stock of underground resources. Focusing on Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (1904), George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Fanny Mayne's Jane Rutherford; Or, the Miners' Strike (1853), this article demonstrates how these works adapt the provincial realist novel's emphasis on social renewal by way of marriage, reproduction, and inheritance to the extraction-based society of industrial Britain, undergirded by a trajectory of depletion and exhaustion rather than renewal. These works' deviation from novelistic chrononormativity expresses a new understanding of an extraction-based present that is claimed at the expense of future generations.

“A Sense of an Absent Future.” Pervading Post-apartheid South African Literature: Re-conceptualisations of Temporality in André Brink’s Transitional Writings

Numerous commentators have recently indicated a prevailing sense among South africans of a historical repetition, a pervasive sentiment that the country has failed to shake off the legacy of apartheid, which extends into the present, and possibly also the future. 1 Such an observation has led South African psychologist, derek Hook, to conclude that in order to adequately address the post-apartheid reality and allow the process of working through trauma, there is a need to abandon the linear Judeo-Christian model of time derived from the Enlightenment. Instead, Hook advocates to start thinking of post-apartheid South Africa not as a socio-economically or racially stratified society, but rather as a country of unsynchronized, split, often overlapping temporalities. Thus, he offers to perceive of ‘chaffing temporalities’ of the contemporary predicament. Resende and Thies, on the other hand, call for a need for a reconceptualised approach to temporality not only when dealing with heavily traumatized postcolonial countries such as South Africa, but more generally when addressing the geopolitics of all the countries of the so-called ‘Global South.’ My paper will discuss the manner in which reconceptualised postcolonial temporality has been addressed by South African transitional writings by André Brink. I will argue that, although Brink’s magical realist novels of the 1990s imaginatively engage with ‘the chaffing temporalities’ of the post-apartheid predicament, their refusal to project any viable visions of the country’s future might ultimately problematise the thorough embrace of Hook’s ‘ethics of temporality.’