Contingency and construction: from mimesis to postmodernism

Contingency and construction: from mimesis to postmodernism

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In this article the transition from literary realism (Balzac, George Eliot, Verga) is described as a shift from mimesis to constructivism.It is indicated how the realist confidence in the ability of the writer to represent reality as such yields to a modernist skepticism which recognises the contingent character of all fictional constructs.In spite of this discovery, modernists such as Kafka, Proust and Sartre still believe in a meaningful search for reality, authenticity and green queen homies truth.This belief seems to disappear in the works of postmodernist authors such as Robbe-Grillet, Eco or Fowles who tend to dissociate fiction from any kind of meaningful search, transforming it into a game: a gadget for the reader.

The author, who adopts the perspective of Critical Theory, argues towards the end of the article that the latter is modernist microtech 184-10 insofar as it refuses to follow the postmodernists in their playful abandoning of key realist and modernist concepts such as truth, authenticity and critique.