Antinomies of Realism

Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture’s relation to political economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; The Cultural Turn; A Singular Modernity; The Modernist Papers; Archaeologies of the Future; Brecht and Method; Ideologies of Theory; Valences of the Dialectic; The Hegel Variations; and Representing Capital.

From the Hardcover edition.

A major contribution to the theory of realism, Jami Bartlett’s book analyzes the processes by which literary language renders objects as real entities. Bartlett’s approach is to apply theories of reference in the philosophy of language to interactions between characters and objects in nineteenth-century literature. She addresses a fundamental question of literary realism—how can language evoke that which is not language?—and the ways in which four key English authors answered that question. George Meredith, William Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Iris Murdoch probe the relationship between words and objects, and provide—in their descriptions, characterizations, and plots—allegories of language use. Bartlett shows, for example, how the daydreamers of Gaskell’s novel Cranford confronted with objects that they will never have access to and lives they will never lead, build semantic associations between familiar and unfamiliar objects that enable them to understand references that they wouldn’t otherwise. Concise and clearly written, Object Lessons is destined to become a key work in theory of the novel.