Material Realisms in Contemporary British Literature

The purpose of this conference will be to assess the persistence of realism in contemporary literary production, thereby taking up Emilie Walezak’s contention that “not only are writers reinventing realism today, but that there are also new ways of reading realism” (Walezak). (One of) its main hypothesi/es is that, paradoxically, realism is back with a vengeance so as to chronicle the demise of the stable, enclosed, sovereign human subject that was, precisely, at the heart of the realistic idiom of the past decades. Owing to the influence of feminist theory in such areas as the ethics of care, vulnerability studies and posthumanism, among others, the contemporary subject is seen to be caught in a mesh of interdependences with its environments. A great deal of emphasis naturally falls on the ways in which s/he is both “embodied and embedded” (Braidotti), how s/he is entwined with the rest of the living, vibrant world (Bennett) through the means, notably, of “entanglements” and “contact zones” (Haraway), at times envisaged in terms of “trans-corporeality” (Alaimo), and how s/he emerges out of intra-actions in which relation precedes existence (Barad). When Barad evokes the category of “agential realism” to reconceptualise our understanding of the subject, or when contemporary scholars unearth John Dupré’s notion of “promiscuous realism” (Dupré) to account for the way in which the human is a series of assemblages and entanglements, a holobiont that is “both an individual and an ecosystem” at the same time (Brandt), they do so to describe a reality that has evolved radically – unless it is our frames of perception that have adapted to our understandings of the contemporary crises. In fact, they refer to a subject that is steeped in a materiality that can no longer be denied or overlooked and that presents itself as a priority. One of the objectives of this conference will be to address the ways in which such new perceptions are remediated by new realistic idioms that take into account manifestations of a new ordinary, hitherto unidentified forms of life, and inventory them. We aim to engage with texts that process our new experience of such realities and present a universe characterised by an “enmeshing of matter and thought, of embodied aesthetic experience and critical experience” that Catherine Bernard calls a “neo-empiricism” (translation ours), a far cry from the binarisms of yesteryear and the metafictional defamiliarization that went along with them. In other terms, we aim to address the ways in which realism redefines itself from inside, by postulating and presenting continuities as opposed to breaks, and by favouring ontologies relying on connections, interactions and intra-actions. Crucially, such a turn (back) to a materialist-realist agenda entails radical aesthetic issues, among which that of the scalar poetics of fictions intent at making us see such entanglements with the micro-reality of organic life forms (Campos). A case in point has been provided by the recent bout of Covid fictions struggling to disclose the organic materiality of our historical condition.