REALISM - 19th CENTURY LITERATURE AND AESTHETIC CULTURE

The nineteenth century is generally considered the century of realism. Artists not only proclaimed themselves realists during that period; realism was also generally the cultural style of the moment and "realism", as a keyword, on everyone's lips. But there were many realisms in universal artistic history: from 'hyper-realism' and 'magical realism' of our days to the Dutch pictorial realism of the seventeenth century; from the realism of Brecht to the one of Lessing; from Renaissance and Baroque realism to that of ancient art. Considering mimesis the main characteristic of art tout court, realism would, even more, be the main characteristic of all arts in all times. But what sense could it have, then, call that particular stylistic phenomenon of nineteenth-century-art 'realism' too?

The course will try to answer this question starting from the nineteenth-century German literature, comparing the characteristics of the art of storytelling of its major representatives (authors like Storm and Stifter, Meyer and Mörike, Büchner and Raabe et al.) with realisms in confining periods and in other arts of the period. Particular attention will be paid to the work of writer-musician Richard Wagner and his 'Gesamtkunstwerk' as a kind of nineteenth-century Realism prototype and living proof of the fact that realism is to be considered in fact an expression of a general cultural aestheticism.