Realism is a combination of individuality and typicality

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Realism is an artistic method in which painters and writers strive to depict reality truthfully, objectively, in its typical manifestations.

The main features that characterize realism are historicism, social analysis, the interaction of typical characters with typical circumstances, self-development of characters and self-movement of action, the desire to recreate the world as a complex unity and contradictory integrity. The fine arts of realism follow the same principles.

Hero of realism

One of the main features of every artistic method is the type of hero. Realism is a special relationship between a character and the world around him.

On the one hand, the hero of realism is a sovereign unique personality. This shows the influence of humanism and the legacy of romanticism: attention is paid not to how good a person is, but to the fact that he is unique, this is a deep independent personality. Therefore, this character cannot be identical to the author or the reader. A person, as realism sees him, is not the "second self" of the writer, like the romantics, and not a complex of some features, but someone fundamentally different. He doesn't fit intoauthor's mindset. The writer explores it. Therefore, often the hero in the plot behaves differently than the author originally planned.

Living according to his own logic of another person, he builds his own destiny.

On the other hand, this unique hero cannot be separated from his many connections with other characters. They form a unity. One hero can no longer be directly opposed to another, as in the literature of romanticism. Reality is depicted both objectively and as an image of consciousness. A person in realism exists in reality and at the same time - in the field of his understanding of reality. For example, let's take the landscape outside the window, which is given in the work. This is at the same time a picture from nature, and at the same time - the attitude of a person, a field of consciousness, and not pure reality. The same applies to things, space and so on. The hero is inscribed in the surrounding world, in its context - cultural, social, political. Realism significantly complicates the image of a person.

Author's position in the literature of realism

Artistic activity from the standpoint of realism is cognitive activity, but aimed at the world of characters. Therefore, the writer becomes a historian of modernity, reconstructing its inner side, as well as the hidden causes of events. In the literature of classicism or romanticism, the drama of personality could be assessed from the standpoint of its positivity, to see the confrontation between the “good” hero and the “bad” world around him. It was customary to describe the character,who does not understand something in objective reality, but then gets some experience. In realism, the semantic whole of the work unites the world with the hero: the environment becomes a field for a new embodiment of those values that the character originally possesses. These values themselves are adjusted in the course of vicissitudes. At the same time, the author is outside the work, above it, but his task is to overcome his own subjectivism. The reader is only given an experience that he cannot experience without reading books.