Experimentation and Innovation in the Twentieth Century, Social Realist Short Story

Experimentation and Innovation in the Twentieth Century, Social Realist Short Story

Speaker: Anthony Patterson

There has been a resurgence of interest in the formal complexities of realism since its marginalisation by many critics in the 1980s and 90s. Such an interest has not readily extended to a consideration of the short story, plausibly because the modern short story has been viewed as being firmly aligned with modernist practice. Some theorists of realism, moreover, such as Georg Lukacs, believed that the ‘incompleteness’ of the form could not reveal the inner contradictions of social formations. Contrary to both Lukacs’s skepticism regarding the political potential of the short story and a still prevailing view of social realism as a limiting detailing of lower class life, I argue that social realism and the short story form have proved more compatible than many critics and commentators believed. With reference to such writers as Nell Dunn, Pat Barker, James Kelman and Irvine Welsh, I argue that for all of its supposed ontological and epistemological limitations, the social realist short story has proved impressively robust and adaptive. Social realism, I contend, is less historically specific than historically contingent in terms of not only social representation but also formal innovation.