"Realism" is simultaneously one of our most used and least understood literary critical categories: invisible in its seeming self-evidence and often undefined in its opposition to other categories such as experimental fiction or genre fiction. Recent years, however, have produced a great deal of interesting criticism about the nature of realism in 19th century fiction, and our project in this course will be to see what insights we can glean by juxtaposing this criticism with more or less realist works of contemporary fiction. Beginning with George Eliot’s 1861 Silas Marner as our representative work of 19th century realism, we'll read Fredric Jameson's Antinomies of Realism, Anna Kornbluh's The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space, and Elaine Freedgood's Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel alongside the following recent novels: Elena Ferrante’s 2012 My Brilliant Friend, Namwali Serpell’s 2019 The Old Drift, and Brandon Taylor’s 2020 Real Life.

 Students will be responsible for finding and reporting on two additional articles on contemporary realism, and for a larger project attuned to their particular interests.