ABSTRACT
At the beginning of Chapter 1, I claimed that questions of knowledge are inseparable from an understanding of realism as a representational form. It is my aim in these final chapters to argue for a positive understanding of realism which I shall define as a genre based upon an implicit communicative contract with the reader that there exists an independent, extra-textual real-world and that knowledge of this realworld can be produced and shared. This performative investment in the possibility of communicative knowledge undoubtedly joins realism, whatever its subject matter, to the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment. The capacity for intersubjective communication is the prerequisite for community and community is the necessary location of all particular individual civic and political rights and responsibilities. Sharable knowledge about the conditions of existence of embodied human creatures in the geographical world constitutes the material basis from which universal claims of justice and well-being must spring. Yet, the literary field in which late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century writing is produced is very different from that in which French and English nineteenth-century realists operated. In the first place, democratic institutions and scientific advances have frequently disappointed any optimistic hope of human advance. This in turn has led to what we might see as a crisis in the very possibility of knowledge. Yet, as Brecht retorted to Lukács against any over-narrow definition of realism: ‘If we wish to have a living and combative literature, which is fully engaged with reality and fully grasps reality, a truly popular literature, we must keep step with the rapid development of reality’ (Brecht 1977: 85). Brecht’s sense of the genre as always in process and transition dismantles that unhelpful binary opposition that misrepresents realism as the conservative other to radical avant-garde experimentalism. Within the present literary and theoretical field, however, a coherent defence of realism must start from an understanding of the crisis of knowledge which has led to such widespread anti-realism in current critical, cultural and philosophical thought.
