Getting to the heart of the matter: realism and modernism

Abstract

This article elaborates on a model to assess the evolution of formal realism in the novel since its inception up to the modernistic turn starting in the last decade of the nineteenth-century. I argue that realism in the novel is connected to a central philosophical issue: representation. Yet the very concept of “representation” became a point of difficulty in literature and in modern philosophy, seeing one cannot compare linguistic representations with reality itself as a test for accuracy because what we mean by “reality” already involves issues of representation. To better understand this puzzle, I examine two explanatory-models – one focusing on the critical development of literary conventions, the other on psycho-sociological developments – concluding that none of them can, alone, explain the impulse toward realistic representation and the evolution of key formal literary techniques that led to the modernistic turn.