Thinking Beyond Modernism: Peripheral Realism and the Ethics of Truth-Telling

Abstract

Thinking Beyond Modernism: Peripheral Realism and the Ethics of Truth-Telling explores how various forms of peripheral realism—an aesthetic that is hugely underappreciated not just in the Western academy but also in postcolonial studies—envision a new cultural analysis that allows us to understand and surpass the limits of modernism. First, I probe how modernist taste, with its ahistorical emphasis on aesthetic form and subjectivity, had far-reaching global influence at the expense of what it systematically jettisoned—that is, various realist attempts to reimagine the social value of literature. I analyze the demands of Western modernist aesthetics and its influence in the making of world literature and cinema to show how peripheral forms of art resist the modernist imperative. Second, I discuss recent instances in which realism re-appears as a problem—its status after the affective turn in literary cultural theory, its advent in the peripheral vision of the metropolitan writer J. M. Coetzee’s Australian Trilogy, and its emergence as a peculiar from of “neo-realism” in literary and cinematic works from South America and South Korea—to demonstrate how authors reclaim an entirely new type of realism. De-emphasizing modernist delight in the wiles of language and skepticism about representations’ correspondence to the real, neo-realists rediscover historical agents’ ability to express their subjectivity in literary form without neglecting their own place in history. Finally, in addition to its broad geographical and political remit, the dissertation is, importantly, a study of genre. By investigating how peripheral neo-realists defend truthfulness and achieve a sober realism that understands the ethical dimension of political life as essentially collective, I argue that realism’s “fidelity to truth” is not merely an epistemological claim but an ethical attitude toward the world.