Modalities of Twentieth-Century Realism : John Dos Passos, Christina Stead, Jean-Paul Sartre and Mercè Rodoreda

Abstract

In The Antinomies of Realism (2013), Fredric Jameson argues that definitions of realism have, almost invariably, engaged binary oppositions; the most frequent antinomy being realism versus modernism. This dissertation focuses on four twentieth-century novels that sit somewhat uneasily between these poles, but have predominantly been understood as modernist. It adopts transnational and comparative critical approaches to identify realist aesthetic strategies and genres in: John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925), Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Âge de raison (1945) and Mercè Rodoreda’s La plaça del Diamant (1962). This dissertation thereby investigates and troubles the political, spatial, temporal and literary historical dimensions of the realism vs. modernism antinomy. The study historicises these authors’ aesthetic interests by revisiting the heated politico-aesthetic debates of the 1930s and their subsequent transformation in the post-war era. Tracing the legacy of these debates into contemporary critical understandings of realism and modernism is vital for explaining why these novels appear formally problematic and why they sit on the semi-periphery of a world literary canon. The dissertation engages critically with recent debates about world literature to understand how these novels’ engagements with (frequently French) realism negotiates local, national and world scales, as well as questions of cultural power and prestige. As both Pierre Bourdieu and Pascale Casanova have argued, literary prestige is strongly correlated with the ostensible autonomy of the literary text—with avant-garde modernism the privileged form. The value placed on autonomy from political and economic issues, and a related emphasis on originality, suggests why allusions to realist texts have been (partially) concealed by these twentieth-century authors. It also suggests why any critic with an interest in canonisation might not look for them. By shifting the focus away from modernism, this study can identify sustained allusions to specific realist texts in these twentieth-century novels. Beyond the clear interest for the four main novels studied, these borrowings highlight occluded dimensions of canonical realist texts that serve to problematise the binary opposition with modernism and conventional literary historical narratives. These novels’ engagements with realism are therefore understood in the context of changing politico-aesthetic debates—often as they play out on a world scale—but also in the specific cultural and historical contexts in which they are written, where they often serve to draw attention to limited access to cultural power.