Space and/or Time

Abstract

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 might now be viewed not as a liquidation but as an attempted sublation of realism into more spatially and cognitively expansive forms.”