Super Glossary

Realism

Entertainment / Literature / Realism: An elastic and ambiguous term with two meanings. (1) First, it refers generally to any artistic or literary portrayal of life in a faithful, accurate manner, unclouded by false ideals, literary conventions, or misplaced aesthetic glorification and beautification of the world. It is a theory or tendency in writing to depict events in human life in a matter-of-fact, straightforward manner. It is an attempt to reflect life 'as it actually is'--a concept in some ways similar to what the Greeks would call mimesis. Typically, 'realism' involves careful description of everyday life, 'warts and all,' often the lives of middle and lower class characters in the case of socialist realism. In general, realism seeks to avoid supernatural, transcendental, or surreal events. It tends to focus as much on the everyday, the mundane, and the normal as events that are extraordinary, exceptional, or extreme. As J. A. Cuddon notes, realism 'more crudely [. . .] Suggests jackets off, sleeves rolled up, 'no nonsense'' attitudes toward literary art (773). (2) Secondly and more specifically, realism refers to a literary movement in America, Europe, and England that developed out of naturalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although realism and the concern for aspects of verisimilitude have been components of literary art to one degree or another in nearly all centuries, the term realism also applies more specifically to the tendency to create detailed, probing analyses of the way 'things really are,' usually involving an emphasis on nearly photographic details, the author's inclusion of in-depth psychological traits for his or her characters, and an attempt to create a literary facsimile of human existence unclouded by convention, clich???©, formulaic traits of genre, sentiment, or the earlier extremes of naturalism. This tendency reveals itself in the growing mania for photography (invented 1839), the tendency toward hyper-realistic paintings and sculpture, the continuing rise of the popular prose novel, the growth of 'realism' in philosophical movements, and in the increasingly realistic stage productions during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The movement contrasts with (and is often used as an antonym for) literary forms such as the romance, science-fiction, fantasy, magic realism, mythology, surrealistic art, modernism and postmodernism.
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