Abstract
Over the last few decades, the realistic novel has been derided by literary theorists associated with the Structuralist and Post-Structuralist schools of thought — the so-called post-Saussurean critics. Their criticisms have not been adequately answered because the underlying theoretical arguments — supposedly derived from Saussure — have not been examined with sufficient care. There has consequently been a tendency to assume that there is a powerful case against realism which must be accepted or ignored with a bad conscience. We are told that realism is dead while the non- or anti-realistic novel is alive and kicking.
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Notes
Robert Scholes, The Fabulators (New York, 1967), p. 6.
Michael Boyd, The Reflexive Novel: Fiction as Critique (Toronto: Lewisburg Bucknell University Press, 1983), p. 9.
Christopher Nash, World-Games: The Tradition of Anti-Realist Revolt (London: Methuen, 1987).
Raymond Tallis, In Defence of Realism (London: Edward Arnold, 1988; Second edition Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).
A.D. Nuttall, A New Mimesis (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. vii–viii.
Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 193.
Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 10.
J.G. Merquior, From Prague to Paris: A Critique of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Thought (London: Verso, 1986), p. 260.
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980).
Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, translated by Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 133.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, translated by Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 1965), pp. 61–2. The arguments alluded to here are addressed in greater detail in In Defence of Realism, op. cit., Chapter 2, As if There Could Possibly be Such Things as True Stories’.
Richard Rorty, ‘Professionalised Philosophy and Transcendental Culture’, Georgia Review, 1976, 30: 763–4.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, translated by Wade Baskin (London: Fontana; Glasgow: Collins, 1974).
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 158.
Geoffrey Leech, Semantics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 29.
See Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and the Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994).
Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (London: Methuen, 1977), pp. 16–17.
Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 188.
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© 1999 Raymond Tallis
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Tallis, R. (1999). Theorrhoea contra Realism. In: Theorrhoea and After. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27100-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27100-9_1
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