Irrealism (the arts)
Irrealism is a term that has been used by various writers in the fields of philosophy, literature, and art to denote specific modes of unreality and/or the problems in concretely defining reality. While in philosophy the term specifically refers to a position put forward by the American philosopher Nelson Goodman, in literature and art it refers to a variety of writers and movements. If the term has nonetheless retained a certain consistency in its use across these fields and would-be movements, it perhaps reflects the word's position in general English usage: though the standard dictionary definition of irreal gives it the same meaning as unreal, irreal is very rarely used in comparison with unreal. Thus, it has generally been used to describe something which, while unreal, is so in a very specific or unusual fashion, usually one emphasizing not just the "not real," but some form of estrangement from our generally accepted sense of reality.
Irrealism in literature
In literature, the term irrealism was first used extensively in the United States in the 1970s to describe the post-realist "new fiction" of writers such as
In recent years, however, the term has been revived in an attempt to describe and categorize, in literary and philosophical terms, how it is that the work of an irrealist writer differs from the work of writers in other, non-realistic genres (e.g., the fantasy of
The online journal
Irrealism in art
Various writers have addressed the question of Irrealism in Art. Many salient observations on Irrealism in Art are found in Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art. Goodman himself produced some multimedia shows, one of which inspired by hockey and is entitled Hockey Seen: A Nightmare in Three Periods and Sudden Death.
Garret Rowlan, writing in The Cafe Irreal, writes that the malaise present in the work of the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, "which recalls Kafka, has to do with the sense of another world lurking, hovering like the long shadows that dominate de Chirico's paintings, which frequently depict a landscape at twilight's uncertain hour. Malaise and mystery are all by-products of the interaction of the real and the unreal, the rub and contact of two worlds caught on irrealism's shimmering surface." [4]
The writer Dean Swinford, whose concept of irrealism was described at length in the section "Irrealism in Literature", wrote that the artist Remedios Varos, in her painting The Juggler, "creates a personal allegorical system which relies on the predetermined symbols of Christian and classical iconography. But these are quickly refigured into a personal system informed by the scientific and organized like a machine...in the Irreal work, allegory operates according to an altered, but constant and orderly iconographic system."
Artist Tristan Tondino claims "There is no specific style to Irrealist Art. It is the result of awareness that every human act is the result of the limitations of the world of the actor."[4]
In Australia, the art journal the art life has recently detected the presence of a "New Irrealism" among the painters of that country, which is described as being an "approach to painting that is decidedly low key, deploying its effects without histrionic showmanship, while creating an eerie other world of ghostly images and abstract washes." What exactly constituted the "old" irrealism, they do not say.
Irrealist Art, Film and Music Edition
Irrealist Art Edition is a publishing company created in the 90s by contemporary plastic artist
See also
- Franz Kafka
- Nikolai Gogol
- René Magritte
- Kōbō Abe
- Giorgio de Chirico
- Magnus Mills
- Jorge Luis Borges
- Donald Barthelme
- John Barth
- Remedios Varo
- Frédéric Iriarte
- D. Harlan Wilson
- Max Blecher
Footnotes
References
- Gardner, John (1984). The Art of Fiction. New York: A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-394-50469-8.
- Bellamy, Joe David (1974). The New Fiction; Interviews with Innovative American Writers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-00430-8.
- Swinford, Dean, “Defining Irrealism: Scientific Development and Allegorical Possibility,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 12.1 (2001): 77–89.
- Evans, G.S. and Alice Whittenburg, "After Kafka: Kafka Criticism and Scholarship as a Resource in an Attempt to Promulgate a New Literary Genre," Journal of the Kafka Society of America, 31/32(1+2): 18–26.