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Fiction & the Real World - Realism
Unit Completion Date: End of Week 13
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At this point in the class, let's look back at what we've done so far and confront an issue that we've danced around to this point in the class. You may have noticed that in many places I have used phrases like "traditional story structures" or a "traditional plot." You may have wondered at the time just what tradition I was referring to, and perhaps even why we did not examine the history of that tradition in greater detail. Part of the answer to these questions is that, this being an introductory class, I have tried to limit the scope to include a manageable number of topics (believe it or not).
A discussion of the tradition I refer to, realism, as opposed to other approaches to fictional writing, opens the floor to an examination of an almost infinite range of techniques that might be used to create surrealist, magical realist, Dadaist and symbolist literature--just to name a few of the other possible approaches. The other reason to address realism to the exclusion of other movements is that most of the others are in one way or another a reaction to the historical dominance of realist fiction.
Most of you are probably writing fairly traditional realist fiction. I can make this assumption because realism is such a dominant approach to fiction. The vast majority of popular literature, and even a large part of more academic or literary fiction, continues to be written using the techniques of realism. Even more so, most movies and television shows are built on techniques designed to persuade the audience that the events (might) really have happened. Since all of us grow up reading realist fiction and watching realist movies, it is only natural that most young writers start out writing realist fiction.
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