Magical realism casts a shadow over the question of modernism in Latin America. [1] Indeed, many critics have insisted on the identity of the two terms. Perry Anderson, for instance, makes such an equation in his insightful essay “Modernity and Revolution” (1984). Eschewing periodization and evolutionary accounts, Anderson proposes a “ conjectural explanation” in which modernist techniques can be seen to emerge “at the intersection between a semi-aristocratic ruling order, a semi-industrialized...

Robert Duncan’s “Introduction” was the final piece that he composed for his 1968 collection of poetry Bending the Bow. The effort preoccupied him throughout much of 1967, a year in which Duncan, alongside many other creative practitioners, recognized that his art was undergoing a formal crisis that stemmed from an increasing awareness of US atrocities in Vietnam. Duncan’s effort to reckon with this crisis of practice yielded a startling manifesto that, despite being positioned as the “Introduction” to the collection he had already composed, in fact theorizes an aesthetic orientation that appears only occasionally and nascently in the collection itself. The piece, written in a dense, vertiginous, and original prose, comes in five short sections. In this article, I focus in particular on the first section, titled THE WAR, which Duncan recited at readings as a prose-poetic work that seeks to exemplify on the spot the practice it theorizes (Quartermain, “Notes,” 797–798). For Duncan, it is the term “collage” that enables him to think of problems of artistic form as problems existing “on the same level” as larger social forms amidst historical crisis and to renovate a dynamic relation wherein the old power of high, idealizing forms of Poetry might be made to cathect pressing political contexts with new force. To those familiar with Duncan, a “sister arts” study that raises the importance of collage will not seem surprising, given Duncan’s close personal relationships with collage and assemblage artists such as Jess (his husband), Bruce Conner, Wallace Berman, and George Herms. Yet, my claims in this article might run counter to expectations raised by this context. Often, such collage practice has been understood as a means of undercutting the authority of its component materials, which are made to no longer speak in the might and right of their traditional site of origin, so that they might constitute a new significance in ironic relation to the other components with which they are collaged. Collage juxtapositions may perform the work of a subcultural, synthetic self-styling, and/or they may work to elicit a cultural criticism, but, in either case, a disillusioning image of what has been received as culturally authentic seems characteristic. The collagist, for example, may like a religious image that they choose to bring into their composition—but in a way that secularizes that image by treating it as “material.” The culturally constructed problematic of such a figure, rather than the expressive raising up of its underpinning religious impulse, seems more what is at stake. Critics thus tend to recruit such practices to a paradigm of the “post-,” such as postmodernism. But Duncan, due to his extreme identification with a vaunted sense of Poetry as his vocation, does not land in this postmodernist version of collage. Duncan’s collage logic proves surprising because it does not deflate the high thing that is brought in but rather sustains its “high-expressive” character.

Doris Lessing’s early essay “The Small Personal Voice” is often considered the fullest elaboration of her realist aesthetics. Prizing nineteenth-century realism (Tolstoy, Stendhal, Balzac) as “the highest form of prose writing,” she criticizes two dominant trends in contemporary fiction, namely Soviet realism and European modernism: novels about collective farms and five-year plans are “dreadful [and] lifeless,” while the writings of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, and Samuel Beckett...

Serialized in the first years of Japan’s modern Shôwa period (1926-1989), Hayashi Fumiko’s wildly popular Diary of a Vagabond ( Hôrôki) recounts, in playful turns both confessional and elusive, its author’s formation in the provincial mining communities of southern Japan and the booming Tokyo metropolis of the 1920s. A testimony of personal life events written in an accessible vernacular style identifiable as feminine in voice, Hayashi’s Diary adapts a narrative genre that had been deployed to...

Realism is a famously tricky term. In literary studies it can denote a genre, an (anti-)aesthetic, a narrative mode, a philosophical literary attitude, or any combination thereof. It can be a cohesive ideal impossible to achieve in modernity (Georg Lukács), a tension between two systems of temporality (Fredric Jameson), or an approach to the novel that is tied to the nineteenth century (Caroline Levine). [1] Among historians of the novel, Ian Watt’s definition of “formal realism” as “the premise...

Whether we accelerate the growth of a plant through time-lapse photography or show its form in forty-fold enlargement, in either case a geyser of new image-worlds hisses up at points in our existence where we would least have thought them possible. —Walter Benjamin, “News About Flowers” Realism doesn’t do what it says it does. Or at least that’s all that critics of realism today seem to agree upon. Whether we read realism in the old “suspicious” style, as an ideological smoke-screen, or follow...

From its inception, much of the discussion around the terms realism and modernism stems from the fact that both are responses to a historically shifting conception of the “real,” naming different procedures for representing it, with implicit and explicit claims as to their adequacy for doing so. This means that modernism can become either another iteration of what was called realism, or a renovation of it. As Joe Cleary puts it, in a special issue of MLQ on “Peripheral Realisms,” “modernism...

At the heart of the dichotomy between modernism and realism is the question of form. Modernist writers linked the upheavals of modernity to a crisis of representation—a sense that the established forms of representing the world and of artistic expression were no longer adequate. The modernist revolt was directed at various targets, with slight variations depending on genre. For narrative prose—as for painting—it was realist aesthetics—for poetry, it was romanticism. This essay considers the...