Realist Vision

by Peter Brooks

Realist Vision explores the claim to represent the world “as it is.” Peter Brooks takes a new look at the realist tradition and its intense interest in the visual. Discussing major English and French novels and paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Brooks provides a lively and perceptive view of the realist project.
Centering each chapter on a single novel or group of paintings, Brooks examines the “invention” of realism beginning with Balzac and Dickens, its apogee in the work of such as Flaubert, Eliot, and Zola, and its continuing force in James and modernists such as Woolf. He considers also the painting of Courbet, Manet, Caillebotte, Tissot, and Lucian Freud, and such recent phenomena as “photorealism” and “reality TV.”

Genres: Nonfiction, Art

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Peter Brooks is the author of Henry James Goes to Paris, Realist Vision, Troubling Confessions, Reading for the Plot, The Melodramatic Imagination, and a number of other books, including the historical novel World Elsewhere. He taught for many years at Yale, where he was Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature, and currently is Andrew W. Mellon Scholar at Princeton.

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a book concerned largely with the representation of reality in nineteenth century novelists and painters, it seems a little like slumming to begin with twenty-first century reality television, but Peter Brooks makes a convincing connection between the Kardashians and Flaubert. What we want of "reality" is vicarious experience. Brooks asks, "Why do we take pleasure in imitations and reproductions of things of our world?" My green plastic soldiers and cheap model-trains that never stayed on the tracks. [to be continued. My dinner's burning.]

[Tauan Tinti · Rating 4 out of 5]

No geral, boas sacadas (às vezes ótimas) sobre escritores e pintores realistas (e sobre o realismo), com "tudo é linguagem"s e lacanismos ocasionais, provavelmente um pouco ligados às modas teóricas de então.

[Lee Wainwright · Rating 4 out of 5]

A readable look at representation in nineteenth century art and literature. Likes to point out that the French can take a much thicker slice of realism than us anglophone lightweights.