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  • Realism and Recording: Remixing Literary and Media History
  • Craig Carey

Twenty years into the twenty-first century, courses in American literary realism are a difficult sell. With English programs often organizing distribution requirements around 1800, 1865, or 1900, the decades between 1860 and 1910 are not exactly prime real estate on your average English degree plan. As Rachel Bowlby writes, realism is “out of date and second rate. Squashed in between the freshness of romanticism and the newness of modernism, it is truly the tasteless spam in the sandwich of literary and cultural history.”1 We can wish or pretend it otherwise, but in a climate of austerity, declining majors, and the expansion of English catalogs to include courses in creative writing, professional writing, new media and the digital humanities, and other fields that compete with literary study, the writing is on the wall. Unless we start inventing new methods to remix, rethink, and remediate realism for the twenty-first century, “the tasteless spam” that many of us savor and value will slowly spoil into obsolescence.

In the classroom, one way to kickstart this reinvention is to move beyond the image of realism as a historical period, a literary and aesthetic form, and a philosophical problem of representation. While realism may be all these things and more, it is also irreducible to any one definition or approach, cutting across different disciplines as both a problem of recording and a problem of representation. As the latter, realism has been studied and kicked around for decades, with scholars replaying many of the same old contradictions about language, representation, and epistemology inherited by the linguistic turn. As a technique of recording, however, realism is untapped and ripe for reinvention. With its focus on inscription, storage, and playback, recording is a term that draws our attention to the material techniques that [End Page 198] actually inscribe reality into form: those neglected “intermediaries which in their concrete particularity form a bridge,” as William James wrote, between reality and representation, mediating the gap between them.2

With its attention to the intermediate chains and circuits on which representations are built, the concept of recording is a useful tool for realigning realism with contemporary developments in science studies, actor network theory, new materialism, and media studies.3 Unlike spectacles of representation, techniques of recording allow us to discern the neglected particulars that inscribe culture behind the scenes of representation. They remind us, as Roland Barthes once said, that “putting things on the most material level” possible is both an “anti-mythological action” and the return of literary realism in a new form.4 In his final lecture course, Barthes explicitly reframed realism as a technical possibility of writing and notation, not just language and representation. “To consider a practice of notation possible (rather than laughable),” he told his students, “is already to concede the possibility of a return (in a spiral) of literary realism.”5 The more he began to reflect on the material techniques of his writing practice, the more he began to see literary realism from a completely different perspective: not just as a symptom of bourgeois ideology, as he famously did in “The Reality Effect,” but as a possibility ingrained in the very act of writing, notation, and recording.6

As a hybrid scholar of literature and media, I usually teach realism by following late Barthes beyond representation and underscoring what Richard Watson Gilder described in 1897 as “the recording tendency” and “reign of recording realism” sweeping the country at the end of the nineteenth century.7 The explosion of new techniques for inscribing culture, coupled with the diversity of writers inventing new methods of recording reality and reality effects, makes the period between 1860 and 1910 a veritable kaleidoscope of idiosyncratic styles, forms, genres, methods, and techniques. In my course on “Realism and Recording,” students explore this diversity by remixing literary history in the broader context of media history and vice versa. In the process, we reframe the period as a “frantic panorama” of recording that traverses across literature, photography, painting, architecture, stenography, phonography, telegraphy, motion pictures, and other popular media.8 We ask questions such as: What does “the recording tendency” look...

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