Svend Erik Larsen, dr. phil., Professor Emeritus, Comparative Literature, Aarhus University, Denmark. Yangtze River Distinguished Visiting Professor, Sichuan University, past Honorary Professor, University College London. Past editor of Orbis Litterarum, past Board Member of EuroScience, past Vice-President of Academia Europaea and past General Treasurer of the International Comparative Literature Association. Books in Chinese: Yingyong Fuhaoxue (2018, Sichuan University Press), Wu Bianjie Wenben: Wenxue Yu Quanqiuhua (2020, Sichuan University Press). Recent articles: “World Literature in an Extended Media Landscape,” The Journal of English Language and Literature 63.4, 2017: 675-686; “Various Theories – and Variation Theory,” Cultural Studies and Literary Theory 38, 2018: 13-32; “Shijie Wenxue Zhong De Yimin Yu Fanyi”, in Zhang Cha, ed.: Waiguo Yuwen Luncong Di-ba Ji, Sichuan University Press, 2018: 68-86; “Narratives as cultural embedment,” Chinese Semiotic Studies 18.3, 2022: 413-425. Co-author and co-editor of Landscapes of Realism 1-2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2021-2022. (See complete CV and bibliography: http://au.dk/en/litsel@cc.au.dk).
A Realism of Conflicting Ontologies
If modern realism
traveled from Europe to other continents during the nineteenth century, the
encounter with literary traditions in those countries broke this unidirectional
trajectory. The encounter both shed light on the particularity of European
realism and transformed it by opening writers to more diversified notions of
what realism might be than envisioned by early writers and critics. From a
one-way or maybe a two-way traffic across countries and continents realism
became a multi-directional literary and aesthetic enterprise. This process
inspired a questioning of the dynamics and the limits of realism which has
nurtured realism across the world in the twentieth and into the twenty-first
century. It has happened in an open global cultural and literary exchange
between writers, texts, translations and media that relativized pre-established
monolithic ideas about centers and peripheries and showed the existence of more
complex global networks. One issue stands out in today’s cross-cultural context
of realist writing which attracted little or no attention within a local or
regional cultural context characterized by a tacit agreement on the ontological
question: what do we regard as real? In local circles, discussions of realism
rather focus on aesthetic strategies with regard to characters, narration,
imaginary language, intermedia and interart perspectives. Today, I will explore
conflicting ontologies in realism as they frame the novel by the Nigerian
writer Chigozie Obioma: An Orchestra of Minorities (2019).