王守仁，南京大学人文社会科学资深教授、博士生导师，当代外国文学与文化研究中心主任。主要研究方向为英美文学、现实主义、英语教育，主持并完成包括国家社科基金重大项目在内的多项科研项目，出版《19世纪英国诗剧研究》、《性别·种族·文化》、《新编美国文学史》第四卷、《英国文学批评史》、《战后世界进程与外国文学进程研究》（4卷）等著作，主编《表征与重构：跨越边界的现实主义文学》等文集。
刘洋，南京大学英语系助理研究员。主要研究方向为早期现代英格兰文学、现实主义小说与理论。译有《文学之用》、《艺术的罪与罚：从陀斯妥耶夫斯基到科波拉》。文章发表在《外国文学评论》、Orbis Litterarum等
The Specters of Realism
This paper explores the critical possibilities of the “specters of realism” as a conceptual metaphor for realism’s existence in literary history, its spirit of unfolding truth as well as its approach to reality. Contrary to René Wellek’s description of realism as a “period-concept”, or a system of norms dominating a specific time with a distinctively traceable trajectory of rise and decline, realism has made recurrent returns to the literary landscape, and, in a spectral gesture, disrupted the linear temporality of a literary history that sees realism as proceeded by romanticism and succeeded by modernism and postmodernism. Behind the acts of mimesis is the realist impulse or desire to pursue truth. It is the desire for truth that drives realist writers to try various ways to approach reality. Drawing on discussions of the “spectral turn” in cultural studies in the past three decades, especially Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, the paper discusses Yan Lianke’s recent critical monograph The Veils of Liaozhai. It argues that Yan Lianke’s realist practice as both an author and critic of realism, exemplary of the contemporary realist enterprise, is premised on a hauntological epistemology that places the novel on the liminal position between the present and the absent, the material and the immaterial, and the visible and the invisible. The spectral analogy, reforming and innovating the traditional realist theory which regards the writer as the observer/subject and reality as the observed/object, provides a new perspective on the mechanism of realism’s resilience and enduring vitality.