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Topic: Hysterical realism

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	Word Spy - hysterical realism
		Exasperated by the enormous reputation accorded her debut, she disparaged it as "the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired, tapdancing 10-year-old".
		Her second most severe critic, James Wood, suggested the novel was an example of "hysterical realism", characterised by "a pursuit of vitality at all costs".
		The conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary, exhausted, and overworked.
	www.wordspy.com /words/hystericalrealism.asp (297 words)

	Realism
		Realism is commonly defined as a concern for fact or reality and rejection of the impractical and visionary.
		Realism is associated with a rejection of fantasy, mythology, and highly complex and, therefore, implausible plots.
		Realism holds that these universals really exist, independently and somehow prior to the world; it is associated with Plato.
	www.roebuckclasses.com /ideas/realism.htm (1004 words)

	hysterical realism / encyclopedic novels (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		I don't really feel like making all the links but I was reminded of this by some links that come up when you search for 'delillo' on ile.
		Hysterical realism is not exactly magical realism, but magical realism's next stop.
		It was a crap article on hysterical realism because Pynchon DeLillo Wallace and Smith are all mining fundamentally different territory.
	ilx.wh3rd.net /thread.php?msgid=2230262 (2475 words)

	Hysterical realism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Hysterical Realism, also called recherché postmodernism or maximalism, is a literary genre typified by a strong contrast between elaborately absurd prose, plotting, or characterization and careful detailed investigations of real specific social phenomena.
		In response, Zadie Smith described hysterical realism as a "painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own White Teeth..." Wood's line of argument echoes many common criticisms of postmodernist art as a whole.
		A less "hysterical" version of such a juxtaposition of essay and narrative passages can be found in the work of Milan Kundera.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Hysterical_realism (236 words)

	Weary Gargoyles
		The focus on comedy really expresses a concern for what conditions are necessary to develop complicity, how the relationship between author and reader is developed through the words and stories.
		The sources of hysterical realism seem to be a mixture of literary doubt - an awkwardness generally about the possibilities of storytelling and its various constituents - to a broader paranoia that orders the worldview of some writers, and spills onto the pages of their fictions.
		Hysterical realism also reflects the influence academia's takeover of literary criticism has had on writing, the emphasis on ideas and broader themes that has become the novel's job to illuminate - the interest in particular perspectives, hybridity, the global economy and its insidious nature, or the redundancy of roots in a multiracial world.
	www.culturewars.org.uk /2004-02/gargoyles.htm (3011 words)

	Postmodernism
		Hysterical realism, also called recherché postmodernism or maximalism is a literary genre characterized by chronic length, manic characters, frenzied action, and frequent digressions on topics secondary to the story.
		Magical realism can be detected in the supernatural tales of E.T.A. Hoffman, which are related in the down-to-earth tone of confessional journalism.
		Magical realism may be viewed as more than a specific historical-geographical literary movement; it is an element of style that can be located in a large variety of novels, poetry, painting, and film.
	www.shortopedia.com /P/O/Postmodernism (1316 words)

	The Kenyon Review
		The term was “hysterical realism.” It referred to a tendency in contemporary fiction toward certain overheated excitements and excessive centripetality, a cartoonish or too restless extremism.
		Hysterical realism is one of those things that floats away from you, of course.
		But she did indeed reply to me, saying that she felt that “hysterical realism” was an uncomfortably precise term for the kind of thing that she was doing.
	www.kenyonreview.org /interviews/wood.php (6109 words)

	Flesh for phantasy: fresh Freud - Lucian Freud ArtForum - Find Articles
		It was the late Francis Bacon--a really existentialist, psychodynamically astute painter of the body--who in effect taught Freud to paint, and whose mantle Freud now wears.
		Manet's realism equivocally straddled painting and photography, but finally, however indirectly, it tilted more to photography (that is, to its conventional 19th-century formulation as matter-of-fact, almost routine description), for it seemed to destroy or at least undermine the act of painting as such.
		Bacon's realism also straddles that divide, but tilts decidedly toward painting; the photograph may be his starting point, but his painting obliterates it.
	www.findarticles.com /p/articles/mi_m0268/is_n7_v32/ai_15329493 (853 words)

	Print
		One flaw is that Pessl is in thrall to stylistic showmanship.
		As if realizing the predicament she is in, Pessl ends the book with an abrupt and ill-thought-out "Final Quiz," that, in a series of stylishly pomo questions, self-consciously points up the book's artifice and laughingly invites us to imagine everything we've read is an elaborate delusion.
		What distinguishes precocious realism from hysterical realism is the confusion of author and subject: In the case of Special Topics, it is hard to separate what is callow about Blue from what might be callow about Pessl herself.
	www.slate.com /toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2155104 (1427 words)

	Books \| Tell me how does it feel?
		Hysterical realism is not exactly magical realism, but magical realism's next stop.
		Rushdie was at it again in his most recent book, Fury, a lamentable novel that combined hysterical realism - dolls, puppets, allegories, a coup on a Fiji-like island, rampant and tiresome caricature, and a noisy, clumsy prose - with the more traditional social novel.
		It ought to be harder, now, either to bounce around in the false zaniness of hysterical realism or to trudge along in the easy fidelity of social realism.
	books.guardian.co.uk /print/0,3858,4271031-99930,00.html (1471 words)

	Get Real
		The reality of consciousness does not require its localization in the brain, but it still depends on features of brain activity, and if we ant to confirm or disconfirm hypotheses about specific conscious experiences, what we need to test is the truth of the claims that constitute somebody's heterophenomenology.
		Similarly, there is certainly a real pattern in the tales told (and believed) by subjects about what occurs to them at various times, what they "do" in their minds at various times, and we'd like to know which of these beliefs of theirs are true.
		Hysterical realism Endnote 16 deserves its name, I will argue, because it is an overreaction, a rationally unmotivatable spasm brought on by peering into the abyss of certain indeterminacies that really should not trouble anybody so much.
	ase.tufts.edu /cogstud/papers/getreal.htm (18779 words)

	Print: The Chronicle: 7/30/2004: Keeping It Real
		Far from challenging the order of capitalist society, realism was one of the means by which that order reinforced its own conception of what was real.
		However ambivalent literary scholars may be about realism in general, specific realist authors have lodged themselves so deeply in the culture as to have virtually defined it.
		Naturalism was the hard edge of literary realism -- works that combined an aesthetic commitment to unvarnished actuality with a keen sense of the darker implications of Darwin's evolutionary ideas.
	chronicle.com /cgi2-bin/printable.cgi?article=http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i47/47a01101.htm (1969 words)

	Maxim Health -- Recommendations and Resources (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		Maximalism is used to describe the very extended post-modern novels, such as those by David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon, where digression, reference, and elaboration of detail occupy a greater and greater fraction of the text.
		It is also called hysterical realism, a term coined by James Wood, who argues that it is a genre similar to magical realism.
		I don't think Pynchon would fit into the hysterical realism genre--203.199.177.246 08:23, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC) To the contrary, Pynchon is often cited as one of the foremost examples of hysterical realism.
	www.becomingapediatrician.com /health/92/maxim-health.html (787 words)

	The Reading Experience: James Wood
		The closest Wood comes to assessing this brand of fiction is his back-of-the-hand dismissal of what he calls "hysterical realism." Wood identifies Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, and Thomas Pynchon as the chief hysterics in question, but one suspects he would accuse many of these other writes I have mentioned of being unduly hysterical as well.
		Clearly Wood means "hysterical realism" to be a disparaging term, but as I said in my post, the only writer it seems to me to fit is Tom Wolfe.
		I don't really think of Wood as a "close reader" in the formalist sense of the concept--and it is essentially a formalist concept.
	noggs.typepad.com /the_reading_experience/2004/10/james_wood.html (3147 words)

	Conversational Reading: James Wood Does Not Impress (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		Realism is just one out of a multitude of "experimental" styles, all trying to depict reality.
		Perhaps realism was just fine to describe the world of the 19th century, but perahps now something a little different is needed to get at the complexity of things as they are.
		The nice thing about literature (or one of the nice things) is that we don't really have to worry about rankings, who's number one, etc. It's not really a competition between realism, super-realism, minimalism, experimental writing, etc, etc, and I'm surprised that Wood feels the need to establish a hierarchy, if that's what he's doing.
	esposito.typepad.com /con_read/2005/08/james_wood_does.html (1558 words)

	[No title]
		Optimism is the incurably silly liberal quality which the new celluloid realism considers ludicrous.
		It is baffling that in the course of his lengthy piece encouraging American liberals to cherish their "right" to hate the ideology behind "A Clockwork Orange," Mr.
		More significant are the disillusionments, the pessimism, and the paranoia that such a belief in human nature must induce." * * * Ardrey elaborates in "African Genesis": "The idealistic American is an environmentalist who accepts the doctrine of man's innate nobility and looks chiefly to economic causes for the source of human woe.
	www.krusch.com /kubrick/Q47.html (2516 words)

	The Elegant Variation: IN WHICH HEROES STUMBLE (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		I really hesitated to comment but then just couldn't help myself as so much as been allowed to pass on this novel which I feel Wood's was an expert in finally noting and objecting to.
		First, phrases like "clearly realism is a major element in great literature and this is obvious" are troubling and problematic to me - partly from the perspective that, as I've suggested, there is much great literature that is not, in fact, terribly realistic; and partly from the notion that anything at all "is obvious"...
		This really matters, because we are overwhelmed right now with bogus authority figures in literature, and also in a peculiar moment when the faith seems in danger.
	marksarvas.blogs.com /elegvar/2005/06/in_which_heroes.html (11571 words)

	n+1
		Today’s writers are hustling their readers, as if reading were some arduous weight-loss regime, or a form of community service; the public goes along, joking about how they really should read more.
		Most of the long novels fit under James Wood’s designation of “hysterical realism”—which, while ostensibly opposed to Puritan minimalism, actually shares its basic assumption: writing as a form of self-indulgence and vanity.
		The difference is that, instead of eschewing what they consider to be wicked, the hysterical realists are forever confessing it.
	www.nplusonemag.com /shortstory.html (2298 words)

	News- He Wrote, She Wrote (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa Thiong'o provides the collection's best piece if only for its uniqueness, his realization of his larger role as an artist, and the freedom of turning away from the political freedom of English.
		In 1977, Thiong'o was imprisoned in Africa for writing in an African tongue, this after a writing career performed in an "English-language mask." In prison, he writes, "I had to find a way of connecting with the language for which I was incarcerated.
		Hysterical realism figures in The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, a collection of Wood's recent critical pieces, mostly from The New Republic and The London Review of Books.
	www.eastbayexpress.com /issues/2004-07-28/books_1.html (874 words)

	The Ultimate Surrealism Dog Breeds Information Guide and Reference
		As with many movements of the period, including Expressionism, its diagnosis of the "problem" of the realism and capitalist civilisation is the restrictive overlay of false rationality, including social and academic convention, on the free functioning of the instinctual urges within the mind.
		In 1937, Breton and Leon Trotsky co-authored a Manifesto for an independent revolutionary art on the need for a permanent revolution, and attacked Stalinism and Socialist realism, as "the negation of freedom".
		Surrealism also attracted to Paris writers from the United Kingdom, one of these would be David Gascoyne, who would become friends with Paul Eluard and Max Ernst, and translate Andre Breton and Salvador Dalí into English.
	www.dogluvers.com /dog_breeds/Surrealism (3836 words)

	Books Books Books \| MetaFilter (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		Like the word "love," it is really a conceptual cloud that encompasses many related ideas.
		Someone who never reads a book can still get his dose of stories -- but he's missing out on certain kinds of stories that work better in print (and vice versa: there are many stories that work better on screen).
		If a blogger really wants to promote literature, he should spend time discussing what literature can do best -- the sorts of feelings and ideas that can be best conjured up with words and sentences.
	www.metafilter.com /mefi/35684 (991 words)

	Word Spy - Kmart realism
		While brand names are frequently found in Kmart realism, the most crucial aspect of the genre is its subject matter: people whose lives are circumscribed by strip malls, trailer parks, rent-to-own stores, tattoo parlors, gun shops, fast-food joints and tanning salons.
		The medieval fabliau was usually written to make fun of middle- or lower-class characters, and K-Mart realism, for all of its fascination not only with things but also the brand names of things, is often similarly condescending.
		Kmart realism (also: K-mart realism) was in full voice in the 1980s, but the term remains popular to this day.
	www.wordspy.com /words/Kmartrealism.asp (355 words)

	bookmunch - online book reviews
		But that’s really a matter of taste, not a per se objection to a form or a genre.
		We’re in agreement on many things, and there are some really uncanny congruences in our backgrounds, our obsessional siftings through the available culture, that make me think we probably would have been close friends in high school if we’d known better.
		As I said before, he’s been a real post for me. The literary world can often be very mean-spirited, a place where people sometimes seem to be afraid of expressing generosity or extending help, as if somehow enhancing someone else’s status diminishes your own.
	www.bookmunch.co.uk /view.php?id=1621 (3097 words)

	Excessive Candour
		His books tend to a kind of globalizing miniaturism, a sinuous intensity of involvement in detailwork cognate with, but significantly lacking in the plethoras of panicked bricolage characteristic of, "hysterical realism"—a term the critic James Wood has recently used to describe the overblown enumerative list-heavy Big Novels of young American male writers of Chabon's generation.
		This reality is not, however, the reality of our own fallen existence here in 2002, in the hysteria of plethora; it is a world, an arcadia, that we—all of us, writers and readers and actors on the stage—feel we had lost forever, but have now earned.
		In Summerland, the emblem and Reality of this long passage into loss and return is the game of baseball.
	www.scifi.com /sfw/issue297/excess.html (829 words)

	Social and Political Novel V
		To match knowledge in the arts and sciences with these integrative realities is, I believe, the intellectual and cultural challenge of the moment….
		It may seem that hysterical realists are greatly concerned with conveying much socio-political information and insight in key relation to exploring human conditions and consciousness but as I’ve touched on here and have explained in more detail in another essay, “Fiction and Social Change,” this is largely not the case.
		Indeed, one frequently finds their adversary impulse toward contemporary reality accompanied by a predisposition to dismiss it impatiently, not to bother with imagining it in any complex way.
	www.politicalnovel.org /socialandpoliticalnovelV.html (2312 words)

	Compare Prices and Read Reviews on Yann Martel - Life of Pi: A Novel at Epinions.com
		In my mind, I understand the beauty in finding the fantastical in the realism that American authors largely create, but I’ve always been more driven by magic realism sentiments.
		To that I say, ‘You may be right.’ I’ve always been one to see the connections of everything to everything, the most incongruous shapes and ideas connected in my cluttered mind.
		There is a very real disconnect in the world out there right now, from those who cling.
	www.epinions.com /content_86089502340 (1308 words)

	Powell's Books - Review-a-Day - White Teeth (Vintage International) by Zadie Smith, reviewed by The New Republic Online (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18)
		Appropriately, then, objections are not made at the level of verisimilitude, but at the level of morality: this style of writing is not to be faulted because it lacks reality — the usual charge against botched realism — but because it seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself.
		But it is really Smith's hot plot which has had its way with her.
		As realism, it is incredible; as satire, it is cartoonish; as cartoon, it is too realistic; and anyway, we are not led toward the consciousness of a truly devoted religionist.
	www.powells.com /review/2001_08_30 (4157 words)

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