Living in an era dominated by documentaries,reality TV shows,first-person narratives like autobiographies, memoirs, etc., we have a burning thirst for reality as David Shields boldly declares in his 2010 Reality Hunger. Not surprisingly, this shared longing for reality, despite a dazzling amount of reality-based media as well as many other cultural and literary products around the world, is also intellectually registered by a resurgent interest in realism in the past decade. Emerging from an imperative to revisit, reassess and reconfigure the variables and potential of the allegedly outworn 19th century literary concept as the realism/modernism divide subsided and a post-anthropocentric shift to materialism invites an expanded vision on a longer time-scale, an impressive scholarship of realism has risen including Fredric Jameson’s The Antinomies of Realism (2013), Alison Shonkwiler’s Reading Capitalist Realism (2014) and The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification and the Limits of Realist Fiction (2017), to name just a few, and not to mention Novel’s 2016 special issue on Worlding Realisms and MLQ’s 2012 special issue on Peripheral Realism.

Invited speakers#

CHEN Xiaoming (Peking University)
HE Chengzhou（Nanjing University）
Steen Bille Jørgensen (Aarhus University)
Svend Erik Larsen, MAE, (Aarhus University)
Rosa Mucignat (King’s College London)
Thomas Pavel (University of Chicago)
Karen-Margrethe Simonsen (Aarhus University)
WANG Shouren (Nanjing University）
XU Lei（Nanjing University）
ZHOU Xian（Nanjing University）

Topics#

Cultural Encounters

• The travel of critical realism (Dickens, Balzac, Gorky, etc.)
• Permutations of socialist realism
• The reception of Magic Realism in China
• Chinese realistic literature in the world

Post-1945 Realism(s) in Literature

• Diversity of realism
• Hallucinatory realism
• The return of realism after postmodernism
• Realistic literature in different parts of the world

Poetics of Realism

• Ethics and realism
• Mimetic stance vs. constructiveness
• Modes of representation
• Realism and truth
• Realism and humanism/posthumanism

Download the conference announcement.

The conference is endorsed by the AE. #

---