Blackwell Reference Online

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I think we should all read nineteenth-century novels, but we shouldn’t try to write them. Jeanette Winterson Discussions of the nineteenth-century realist novel have been afflicted by questions of epistemology. This seeming paradox – for what kind of a claim is made by the word “realism” if not an epistemological one? – is nevertheless defensible. For “realism” understood as the mere epistemological dimension of all writing (or indeed all utterances) is clearly at once inescapable and inadequate as a measure. It is inescapable because all utterances (and realist novels are at least this) occur in a shared material and social world, and are meaningless outside of this context – in this regard “realism” is a way of referring to their inescapable pragmatic location. This is as true of those genres which transgress the canons of everyday plausibility and verisimilitude as it is of those which conform to them rigorously, for all utterances make sense by virtue of the way in which they position themselves in the world inhabited by both speaker and listener, or writer and reader. To this extent “realism” is a form of deictic anchorage, an acknowledgment that the force of an utterance is dependent upon its location in (or assertion of dislocation from) the world we all inhabit. Another way of describing this is to say that “realism” – the inevitable effort to locate an utterance in the ... log in or subscribe to read full text