World Postmodern Fiction.

World Postmodern Fiction
Christopher Nash

By
Marwa Talaat, Walaa Yosry & Yasmine Esmail



The Realist Tradition:

1. Definition of Realism from different points of view:

1.1. Nash’s opinion: “Realism cannot properly be defined. There are many arguments that realism is about reality and reality is nothing more definable than ‘everything in human experience’.”
1.2. Rousseau’s opinion: The most extravagantly ‘unrealistic’ were the greatest realists... Rousseau said, “Every writer thinks he is a realist”, i.e., every writer conveys the reality from his own point of view as he sees it.
1.3. Sterne in his book On Realism says, “There is the realism of description”; a work of art provides “the serious representation of everyday reality” or the “realism of assessment”; realistic literature affords us a “reliable evaluation” of events in life.


2. Realism and History:

2.1. “Each age has its own different reality. Realism, then, changes; a work that is realistic for one culture eludes precise and accurate description as realistic for another.”


3. Ideas of Realism:

3.1. The world of realism should be represented as it is actually .This world is a complete, integrated system governed by some coherent scheme of rules.
3.2. If the world within the novel is semblance to the world already there, it should convince the reader because he might live in this world.
3.3. Realism should be clear because it fits the reader established experience but with the help of the narrator.
3.4. The world represented within a realist novel must be represented with respect to our everyday reality.
3.5. Realism gives “details of common typical average people and events… common language, common knowledge, common experience… no supernatural, no dragons, no paradise, no hell except those that may be accounted for by natural law… No kings and no queens unless they are basically like everybody else.”
3.6. “Realism is concerned with showing things in ‘the middle distance’… The realist attitude only makes sense and works in a world in which there are people, individuals of some degree of integrity and coherence of character”, says Sterne.


4. Realist Fiction:

4.1. Realist fictions have exact shapes that have no cracks and if any crack appears, it turns to be the character’s psychology. Realism then does not present a real world but presents real persons.


5. Content of Realism:

5.1. Realism is concerned with the single details of human being including their public, spiritual, political and sexual behavior and influence, also with wealth, property, and prestige of personal image.
5.2. As Sterne says, “‘symbolism’ must be eschewed… as a window a novel must appear unclouded by meaning of its own. Things are what they seem.”