Realist Critiques of Visual Culture

Description

Have industrial-age technologies and visual discourses transformed us into spectators of the real, and can realist fiction make that transformation visible to us? This book brings Situationist Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and an array of cultural criticism into dialogue with novels by Hardy, Forster, Woolf, Rushdie, Carey and Barnes to foreground literary realism’s critique of visual culture, including Gothic architectural revival, neoclassicism, tourism, historical pageantry, postcolonial cinema and photography, museums, preservationism, urbanism and artisanal neo-folk movements. Barnaby advances the concept of meta-spectacle to distinguish realist fiction that engages ethically with visual discourses from realist-ic fiction that reproduces the visible veneer of reality for aesthetic consumption. He highlights the limitations of artistic critiques of spectacle, considers their resilience toward a culture industry that continuously repackages iconoclasm as iconicity, and reflects upon the process of reorienting the reader to comprehend realist gestures. By heightening the capacity to recognize our own immersion within objectified representations of the real, Realist Critiques of Visual Culture demonstrates how literary realism remains vital within a society that is so deeply invested in visually replicating and archiving lived experience. Front Matter ....Pages i-vii Introduction: Literary Realism as Meta-Spectacle (Edward Barnaby)....Pages 1-29 “Pugin was wrong, and Wren was right”—Architectural Revival as Spectacle in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (Edward Barnaby)....Pages 31-55 “The true Italy is to be found by patient observation”—Tourism as Spectacle in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View (Edward Barnaby)....Pages 57-79 “You’ve stirred in me my unacted part”—Historical Pageantry as Spectacle in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (Edward Barnaby)....Pages 81-113 “Pressed against the screen”—Cinema and Photography as Spectacle in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (Edward Barnaby)....Pages 115-139 “The law of white gloves”—The Museum as Spectacle in Edward Carey’s Observatory Mansions (Edward Barnaby)....Pages 141-166 Epilogue: “Those old soixante-huitards”—Debord as Spectacle in Julian Barnes’ England, England (Edward Barnaby)....Pages 167-181 Back Matter ....Pages 183-186