ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

There has long been a common perception of realism as a disciplinary narrative mode, one which must exclude or assimilate extremes, to paraphrase George Levine. The papers in this panel examine the workings of exclusion or assimilation and the processes of “othering” in works of literary and cinematic realism. They consider the various others of realist texts and the importance of imperialism and globalization, narrative articulations of space, epistemological clashes, and political realities to the excluded or assimilated others that realism represents.

Friday, March 24

Kris Mayrhofer, Emory University
“When Seers Go Blind: Misreadings in La fille aux yeux d’or”
Nick Bentley, Keele University
“Alan Sillitoe’s 1950s Fiction: Realism, Representation and the (Ir)responsibility of Writing”
Suzanne Schulz, University of Texas at Austin
“A Cinema Fit for a New Nation: Realism and Post-Independence Film in India”

Saturday, March 25

Christine Achinger, University of Nottingham
“Modernity, Realism and ‘the Jew’ in Gustav Freytag’s Debit and Credit”
Katra Byram, University of California, Berkeley
“German Realism’s Proximal Others: Franz Grillparzer’s The Poor Musician and Theodor Storm’s Aquis submersus”
John Lyon, University of Pittsburgh
“German Realism’s Other: The Space of Modernity”

Sunday, March 26

Richard So, Columbia University
“Theodore Dreiser’s Missing Chinese: Chinese American Rewritings of American Literary Realism”
Michael Allan, University of California, Berkeley
“Secularity, Realism and the Limits of Empire: Epistemological Otherness in Najib Mahfuz’s Qasr al-Shawq”
Daniel Bautista, Lehman College, CUNY
“Magical Others: Slave Narrative, Race, and Magical Realism”
Eva Aldea, Royal Holloway, University of London
“The Textual Subversion and Political Application of Magical Realism: A Double Bind”