In my previous post, “Versions of Reality”, I suggested that there is no singular thing that we can call realistic mimesis, because people see reality differently. Realism is at best a family of styles, a family of attitudes. In this post I want to examine the edges of the realistic family in some passages of … Continue reading Miss Havisham

In a previous post I looked at a passage of world-building from Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark. In this post I will look at that passage again from several perspectives, and then compare it to a passage from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. Here’s the passage from The Song of the Lark: “Dr. Howard … Continue reading Versions of Reality

In recent posts I’ve been examining realistic mimesis through descriptions of things that are real and realistic descriptions of things that are fictional. In this post I want to consider a couple of passages that test the boundaries of realistic description through the representation of disordered consciousness. I begin with the first paragraph of Charles … Continue reading The Mimesis of Disordered Consciousness