Realism
Instructor: Michael Robertson
We frequently say that a work of art is realistic. But what exactly do we mean? Can fiction mirror reality? Or is realism purely a matter of form? What is the connection between literary realism and economic, political, and social forces? This course will examine these questions through a study of two centuries of fictional masterpieces and literary theory. We will read two nineteenth-century realist classics (Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary), an example of modernist realism (Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway), and the foundational text of magical realism (Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude), in addition to short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen Crane, and Bobbie Ann Mason.