Realisms

In his “Reflections on the Brecht-Lukács Debate”, Fredric Jameson argued that the ‘originality of the concept of realism… lies in its claim to cognitive as well as aesthetic status’ (Jameson, 1980, 135). To reflect, then, on the nature of realism in contemporary fiction, this chapter will first outline the thrust of recent philosophical work on the nature of the real, before analysing how this may affect perspectives on fiction.