1 See my Bilder der Erfahrung and “Cognitive Style and Perceptual Skill in the Realism of Thomas Eakins.” A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation and Emotional Identification - A Response to Winfried Fluck Peter Schneck Observing Emotions Even after several - and increasingly edifying - re-readings of Winfried Fluck’s essay on “Realism and the Expression of Emotions” (2006), I still cannot help but feeling most affected and indeed, both exquisitely intrigued and inspired, by two peculiar passages which may at first glance appear completely inconspicuous for most readers. Inconspicuous certainly, but mostly so, I would presume, because the main argument of the piece is so convincing and profound. And, incidentally, the passages that I have in mind mark the very opening and closing moves within the larger argument and thus they are even more salient almost as a kind of framing device. I do not mean to suggest, though, that there is some hidden motive to be revealed by focusing on these passages, the reason I felt so affected by them maybe due to their resonating with some long lost (and only recently revived) occupations of my own involvement with the question of emotion and cognition in literature and the visual arts. 1 Re-reading the article thus had an immediate, if slightly subconscious, effect of re-experiencing both the tremendous impact of Fluck’s observations and arguments on my own thinking, and re-experiencing the equally tremendous challenge of answering his observations and arguments with one’s own, always feeling to be asked to rise to the occasion - the occasion, that is, to expand and develop the shared thoughts further. So, this is what I am also trying to do in the following - once again. And I am rather grateful for the opportunity! I shall come back to what was called the opening and closing moves of the article in due time, but first I may need to sketch out what I see as the central argument, in order to get a better grasp of what I think are the wider implications of Fluck’s discussion of realism and the expression of emotion. I should add that my aim here is not to present a counter argument of sorts or enter into a review or even critique of the piece at hand. On the contrary, the objective here is to ponder in a more or less associative manner on some of its central observations and insights, since I think that Fluck’s observations have a far wider significance and resonance than one would initially gather from the claims made by the article itself. So, it is a bit of a case of chasing for the “more than meets the eye” - which is also a convenient reminder of the essential visual dimension which the experience of emotional states of others and their expression to others appear to share. This is why, I think, both the comparison and the contrast of literary and visual expressions of emotions is no accidental strategy here - the visual might indeed be taken as the most inevitable strategic plane of representation. As the full title of the article proclaims, we are invited or maybe even challenged to “cross the threshold” between different models or concepts of emotional identification. On the one hand, there is a model of emotional affectedness which links literary realism to, but also sets it apart from, preceding genres and models, i.e. romanticism and the sentimental novel. On the other hand, the threshold marks or positions realism as such as a transitional period, and thus as a kind of enabling and preparing stage for another model of emo‐ tional identification, which eventually was to be fully realized in modernism. In other words, realism - and this includes both literary realism and realism in the visual arts - as a particular period and style in U.S.-American culture of the 19th century is being discussed as a distinct and decisive moment within a larger history, i.e. the history of the expression of emotions in the arts. This statement, of course, could be translated and rephrased in different ways, either as a history of aesthetic expressions of emotion in the arts or the history of aesthetic responses to the changes of emotional expressiveness in cultural contexts - or even the artistic and aesthetic negotiation of the role and function of emotions and their expression in specific social and cultural contexts. The difference between these options lies, among other things, in the level of critical energy which one would concede to artistic practices of representation. That is, concepts of realism which insist on the pursuit for objective, factual and observational truth in representation would most likely tone down or underestimate the critical charge or objective of realism as a politico-ethical endeavor - scientific realism is not the same as social realism. But nevertheless, they are both realisms. So, the real question is, what do emotions mean for realism as a critical and an affirmative project? 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0010 148 Peter Schneck If I appear to be oversimplifying at this point, it may be due to the sheer force of the argument and its extremely convincing combination of a choice selection and surprisingly detailed discussions of individual literary texts and visual artworks (about which more below). Moreover, this is made to support an extremely generalized and radical synthetical historical argument about the demise or decline of realist assumptions about psychological depth and emotional involvement and the emergence and dominance of modern(ist) assumptions in regard to the mere performativity and superficiality of emotional expressiveness. Indeed, if looked at as a narrative, the main argument of the essay could be described as a tale of increasing loss and lack. Realism came into its own by questioning the somewhat uninhibited, melodramatic expression of emotion and emotional states in the sentimental modes of representation which governed romantic genres in literary and visual arts. Realism, thus, was not disinterested when it comes to emotions. Quite the contrary, realism had strong opinions about emotions. One could say then that realism, however defined, comes into its own by establishing a counter discourse on emotions, emotional states and the expression of emotions which sets it apart from its literary predecessors in the most distinctive manner. This counter position, however, is deeply ambivalent because while realism wants to discredit the particular investment of sentimental literature in the (melo-)dramatic expression of emotions within social contexts, it cannot simply neglect or disavow emotions as an undeniable fact of individual subjective experience. On the contrary, as Henry James famously attested in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady, the richness of emotional struggle within his subjects was all as interesting and exciting as a pirate adventure, if not more so. As Fluck argues, it is the interior struggles, not the outward display of emotions which give depth to realist characters, at least in Howells and in James. For their readers, in turn, it meant to develop a different response to the emotions felt and negotiated by the protagonists, no longer an empathic identification with the feelings of others but rather a participant’s observation of the way in which emotions were being processed and assessed by the respective characters themselves. With James, in particular, this process of assessment is what binds the reader’s experience to the experience of his subjects, as we are asked to struggle with them and their emotional experience in order to better understand ourselves and others. Social cognition from the perspective of realists like James, Howells and, in painting, one may add Eakins, demands a form of emotional involvement which always contains the seed of cognitive expansion; the emotional quality and ‘charge’ of experience is invested both in its cognitive negotiation and the transcendence of mere conventional affirmation. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0010 A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation, and Emotional Identification 149 Emotions are inner intensities, they belong to the individual, and only a rich, acknowledged and grasped inner life will result in the form of experience which can be invested and translated into social competence. Yet, as the article’s cautionary tale suggests, this presupposes a depth of character which apparently gets lost in the transition from realism to modernism: the modern subject merely manages its sociality by the careful curation of a shallow emotionality, a certain coolness or unaffectedness, presented most exemplary by Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Madame X. Real Feeling This brings me to one of the two passages which I found so intriguing, and in a somewhat confusing way, it was the closing sentence which actually initiated the re-reading and re-thinking of the ‘narrative’ in general, but in particular, the central ‘problem’ of the expression of emotions in literature and the visual arts. At the end of the essay, the assessment of modern individuality clearly states the lack and loss: “Human beings do not possess something like an inner core, and if there is no longer an inner core (where the person’s true character resides) then reality becomes a surface phenomenon and emotions become moods or stylized gestures embedded into these surfaces” (Fluck, “Threshold,” in this volume 145). But this is not a concluding statement since in the final two remarks this assessment is used to mark the further historical trajectory of realist art by pointing out that visual artists like Edward Hopper and later Richard Estes continued to exemplify a realism of the pose and of surfaces. The continuity is affirmed and also relativized in the final statement that Hopper’s and Estes’ art might be considered an “altogether different chapter in the tenuous relation between realism and the expression of emotions” (145). What I found startling and stumbled over was not the simple suggestion that there was and continues to be a specific “relation” between realism and the expression of emotions, but rather that this relation was a “tenuous” one. It was, of course, one of these moments where one finishes thinking before the argument is over, thus I had already distilled a particular synthesis from the narrative which made me somehow expect the last sentence (obviously also based on Fluck’s work on Hopper and the photorealists and on surface realism), but the “tenuous” somehow flew into the face of expectations. At least into the face of my expectations, and I do not claim this to be more than a rather subjective response - a response, however, that made me re-read and re-think Fluck’s argument and also my own thoughts about it. As a term which is meant to describe a relation, “tenuous” has a number of slightly overlapping, but also 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0010 150 Peter Schneck slightly divergent meanings, ranging from “weak” to “questionable” to “fragile” and “unsubstantiated” - and maybe this is what somehow jarred with my own feeling about the relation between realism and the expression of emotions which made me expect a different characterization, closer to “intense” or “invested” or maybe (a bit closer, but still different) “ambivalent.” This is not an argument about semantic precision - I am absolutely sure that tenuous is the best and most precise term for the perspective on the relation which the article wants us to assume, and it may indeed have been that “jarring” precision which positively challenged me to rethink my own perspective. Which opened another view on the problem at hand, namely, the function which the expression of emotions may (or even must) assume for the objectives of realist fiction and visual art and their respective aesthetic forms and effects. In this respect, the article reaches way beyond the formulation and discussion of period specific constellations and oppositions, say, between depth and surface, between true emotions and performative moods. As is described at the outset, if realism’s objective is to tell “the truth about reality,” what counts as truth and reality in a representation is itself dependent on the “tacit assumptions of what constitutes reality” which readers, viewers, and spectators bring to bear on their readings and viewing of specific representations. Arguably then, the challenge for realists like Howells, James, and also Eakins, was twofold, aiming at two different, at times also conflicting, effects. On the one hand, a strategy of affirmative representation, claiming that realism only represents what is already there, does not invent, create, or construct; rather, it records, documents, observes, and analyzes. On the other hand, however, there is a strategy of disruption, disillusion, and even denial of affirmation, a strategy which targets precisely some (if not all) of the tacit assumptions about reality and truth to allow for a more direct and unmediated view and experience the material. This obviously must create a tension within or even a rift running right through the model of representation which realism in general is based on. The model both assumes and acknowledges the social construction of reality, at least the social struggle over reality as the sphere of action but also the sphere of ideas. Both the construction and the struggle over it are dependent on performative strategies; what unites the distinct practices of realist disillusion in Howells, James, and Eakins is the common attempt to move beyond the performative, to reveal its strategic character or, in a complementary move, concentrate on and present moments of individual articulation in reaction to the demands of social performativity. In all cases, these moments of individual articulation result from a struggle, that is, their realism does not, indeed, cannot rely on the fortunate coincidence of objective observation and the revelation of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0010 A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation, and Emotional Identification 151 true character. Individual resilience in face of social demands for behaving or performing are thus not the effect of a natural disposition (a depth of character which is already formed before it becomes contested in social settings and struggles). Rather, as the insistence on experience as a process of development in realist plots indicates, depth of character is the result of an ongoing negotiation, a balancing act, a form of adaptation and self-positioning which comes to accept the fundamentally social constructedness of reality but, at the same time, carves out a sphere of individual autonomy (if not of action, than at least of thinking). From this perspective, the role of emotions becomes even more complex - in fact, they present the most powerful and also the most ambivalent aspect of this process of emergent autonomy. As an exemplary case, we may take the conclusion of The Portrait of a Lady as a confirmation of the learning process of its major protagonist Isabel Archer, even while we might debate whether the result is a completely autonomous and ‘rich’ character. The least we can say - if we acknowledge that realism asks for an assessment of character in light of our own response to its performance - is that at the end of the novel Isabel is not an individual whose experience is defined by her emotions, but rather a character whose depth is dependent as much on her emotional experience as it is on her cognitive processing of that experience. In a curious, but also disturbingly plausible, even consequential way, the Jamesian disillusion of character involves a revision and realignment of expe‐ rience that acknowledges the necessity of affect and emotional involvement while at the same time rejecting any mode of melodramatic display. Yet, that does not mean that there is no melodrama. In fact, experience in James is full of melodramatic aspects and scenes which are, however, fully contained within the experiencing consciousness. James’s famous “imagination of disaster” provides for a rich and often highly affective drama within his characters’ visions of themselves and their social interactions. Thus, the example from Washington Square, while extremely effective, is rather special in the sense that highlights the focalizing position - the participant observer - as well as the solitary emotional struggle of the main protagonist. This does indeed underline that for James, as well as for realism in general, genuine emotions are a rather private and intimate affair. And as such, they illustrate the affective investment necessitated by the norms of composure and control, in fact, the self-discipline expected to be achieved (and performed) by social actors in full possession of their respective character. Yet arguably, the act of affective observation in Washington Square appears rather subdued in comparison to the much more intrusive and expansive modes of the melodramatic staging of consciousness in other novels by James 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0010 152 Peter Schneck (Howells is a different case). Of course, even the extensive display of inner turmoil and struggle as, for instance, in Isabel’s night of assaulting visions, or Maggie Verver’s emotional and imaginative negotiation of her husband’s affair in The Golden Bowl, are clear demonstrations of the main thesis about realism’s attempt to build character on affective control. But that does not mean that the display of emotions is relegated to the sphere of irrelevant excess. Rather, the strategies revolving around the expression of emotion in American realism - and this includes Eakins in rather obvious ways - are (also) geared towards a reorientation and redirection of the aesthetic response by the reader to the expression of emotion in literature. Feeling Real Crossing the threshold: For one final round of comments, I take inspiration from the title of Fluck’s article and, moreover, from the subsequent anecdotal and biographical passages in the first part. What connects the title with the said passages is that while they appear rather unobtrusive, they are also highly suggestive. Thus, the short remarks on our generic response to the failed realism of a Hollywood movie at the beginning of the article, as well as the biographical reminiscence about reading Anna Karenina as a boy, are salient reminders of the unique perspective on American realism which, as Fluck states at the beginning, emerged as a ‘reaction’ to dominant models of realist literature in the 1960s (both in German scholarship and beyond) which ‘provoked’ him, in his words, to “write my own interpretation of American realism” (130). At the core of this interpretation, as the title of his prominent study Inszenierte Wirklichkeit suggests, one finds a more or less explicit notion of staging or directing or even composing a scene - precisely, composing reality (Wirklichkeit) as a scene and within a scene. More or less explicit simply means that the staging at the heart of the cultural project of American realism, as Fluck understands it, cannot be and should not be reduced to an explicit constructivist strategy. This I always took to be an important, even essential proviso which marks the difference between American realism in its own context and the realisms which succeeded it. It might even be taken as the difference within in the sense of the “threshold,” since 19thcentury American realism can be looked at from two directions, and it points in two opposite directions at once. The staging, then, is less the construction of a reality which defies or declines representation in any form. Rather, the staging is meant to provoke a particular form of attention and involvement on the side of the reader. The reality of the social environment, the major concern 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0010 A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation, and Emotional Identification 153 of American Realism, is less marked by the affirmation of objective or material reality based on observation, but much more in the relatability of the experience of its protagonists while they are negotiating conflicting claims about what counts as “real” in specific social settings and struggles. For the literary representation of this experience, emotional investment is an important indicator of the negotiation on the level of character building and action, but also a central instrument for modulating the response of the reader. Thus, the staging of emotions happens in two ways. On the one hand, emotions have to be managed by the characters as part of their investment in the social construction of reality. On the other hand, from the reader’s perspective, the emotional qualities of the social experience of the fictional characters has to be regarded - and indeed processed - as an important aspect of the social construction of reality actualized in the process of reception, i.e. reading (and, to a certain extent looking at or, better, observing) character aims at the reintegration of affective charges into the experience of a developed consciousness. This then, ideally, is when character is acknowledged as a “type of self” one may identify with. That form of identification, while it is not devoid of emotional qualities, cannot be reduced to the forms of empathy based on affective mobilization alone. When James carefully stages the emotions of his heroine in Washington Square by giving us an unacknowledged and thus privileged position as a silent witness, we are asked to identify with Catherine Sloper exactly on grounds of the social situatedness of her emotions and the processes of interiorization and cognitive integration which become legible in the very act of staging the character as a self. The process of acknowledging one’s self within its social confinements is indeed central in Washington Square (as it is in all of James’s novels) and it is to a great extent a process of emotional discovery and development, made explicit in the novel itself: She had an entirely new feeling which may be described as a state of expectant suspense about her own actions. She watched herself as she would have watched another person and wondered what she would do. It was as if this other person, who was both herself and not herself, had suddenly sprung into being, inspiring her with a natural curiosity as to the performance of untested functions. (71) The sense of richness and depth of personal self, then, is to a great extent the result of the struggle to negotiate the tension between the emotional charge of individual experience and the demands for its integration in socially situated forms of experience. This also aligns the reading of fictional experience with the process of negotiation described, because in the act of reading we have to reintegrate our selves with a fictional other, which is both ourselves and not ourselves. If, for a moment, this can stand as an acceptable reinterpretation of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0010 154 Peter Schneck the major concept of the “rich self ” at the heart of the article’s argument, it may help to reveal yet another threshold reading of American realism’s peculiar and indeed “tenuous” relation to emotions and modernity. So, my final inspiration encourages me to respond to the particular position which John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Madame X holds in the specific argument of the article, and maybe also in a more general argument about the represen‐ tation of emotion and character (or self) on the threshold between realism and modernism in American culture. Read from a realist perspective as an attempt to come to terms with the complexity and depth of personal experience and selfformation, the portrait may indeed be taken as a result of a deep frustration, both in regard to its artistic and epistemological objectives. That frustration is rather convincingly documented in Sargent’s preparatory sketches and his personal statements about his difficulties to get the subject into a productive pose. The eccentric and capricious socialite thus appeared to be rather resistant to Sargent’s ideas about adequate and effective forms of self-posing. From this perspective it is certainly not altogether wrong to read that resistance back into the picture as a kind of emotional defense or even denial of sympathy (which would include the painter - encouraging an even more tempting and complex route of reading the painting). My question here concerns the degree of generalization we should accept for the reading of this particular portrait by Sargent as exemplary and thus symptomatic for the modern emotional subject. Again, from a realist perspective, the portrait just shows what is there - or better, what is lacking. Madame X is all performance and no personality and thus regarded not as a subject but as an object exclusively. In other words, Sargent’s realism is defied by its human subject precisely because the subject does not comply with - indeed does not exist due to - the protocols of representation which demand and afford the assumption and thus the projection of depth. A specific projection, to be sure, because it relies on the assumption of a very particular constellation of practice, experience and self-constitution - all of which is somehow, and frustratingly so, missing from the portrait. Yet the frustration may be affected by the attempt to read Sargent’s portraits according to the logic of “constrained emotion” (Eakins) or “interiorized, priva‐ tized emotion” (James), i.e. a practice of portrayal which uses a specific repertoire of social cues to indicate implicit emotional states as a form of communication with “the other self,” that is, the reader or the spectator. This may be the reason be why in Eakins’ most intense portraits his subjects appear both as private and as social subjects, so that whatever emotional or cognitive interior processes are implied, they are not fully contained or even denied by the act of observation. There is a tacit understanding on both sides of the canvas, as it were, that the act 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0010 A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation, and Emotional Identification 155 of portrayal is an act of communication which is both private, intimate even, and public at the same time. Yet that tacit understanding is indeed a mutual affirmation of the specific social codes of signification which make the implicit signs of (rich) interiority readable on the outside. There is no such controlled privacy or intimacy implied in the portrait of Madame X, in fact, the portrait appears to be almost scandalously explicit in its denial of direct communication with its subject - an object on display more than a subject with a constrained or rich inner life. Yet that does not mean that the “object” presented in this way cannot be read as a subject at all, indeed, Madame X may be seen as “threshold” subject which if looked at from the realist perspective informed by a Jamesian social sensibility would be as much a revelation of character as James’s careful staging of his own female subjects in Washington Square or The Portrait of A Lady. Only that which is being revealed is not an intimate interiority of emotional struggle or depth, but the opposite: “looking disdainfully away from the viewer’s gaze (…) gave her an air of the femme fatale (…) part self-made work of art, part indifferent sexual predator both converging in the image of an idol. Her air is that of an affected, strained, slightly poisonous (…)” (Hughes 252, 253). These descriptions, made by Robert Hughes, are a fair sample of contemporary reactions to the painting and to the subject, and they indicate how much Sargent’s strategies of presenting his subject in a specific mode of “self-staging” were read back into the subject by interpreting the particular features of the painted pose merely as (rather explicit) character traits of the sitter. Whether this was the intended effect of a complicitous “pact between two pushy Americans anxious to make their mark in Paris with a succès de scandale” (Hughes 252) or Sargent’s reaction to his sitters’ unwillingness to comply with more conventional and less controversial codes of posing for a portrait is open to debate, but does Madame X thus stand for the new “modern” subject of emotion? Or, to put it more directly, does Sargent’s staging merely reveal the hollowness and artificiality of his sitter or is he presenting a type of the modern subject, all surface and no depth? And, finally, does that mean that Sargent has crossed the threshold from realism to modernism by discarding realism’s interest in individuality and character in favor of an aestheticism of selfperformance, of surfaces and the play of forms? This brings me back to the question of the representation of emotion, and the double perspective which Fluck’s article suggests with the concept of the threshold. The answer to the questions above very much depends on the specific historical reconstruction and assessment of the strategies and practices of repre‐ sentation which are categorized under the rubric of realism. Seen from a long historical trajectory which runs from Eakins, James, and Howells to Sargent, Norris, and Dreiser and then on to Hopper and the photorealists of the 1970s, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0010 156 Peter Schneck Sargent is crossing the threshold - or at least he is marking it with Madame X - between the rich and deep emotional subject of American realism and the emotionally hollow or at least inscrutable modern subject of emotion. From the perspective of this historical trajectory the view is indeed one of loss and increasing lack: If one of the objectives of realism was to find an authentic and plausible, that is, a both evidentially substantiated and ethically viable way of representing emotions, the transition to a modernist aesthetic of “surface realism” appears to be a surrender, indeed, an acknowledgement of the general failure of the original realist model of representation. The reason for this failure, however, is not to be seen in the increasing lack of genuine subjects with genuine emotions, however suggestive this line of reasoning may appear. Rather, it is the result of a waning presupposition, indeed the conviction that the progress of civilizing processes and the increasing socialization of the subject will result in ever more complex, enriching, and individualized forms of subjectivity. Instead, what the realism(s) of Sargent, Dreiser, Hopper and the more contemporary forms of surface realism suggest is a general lack of emotional and intellectual depth in the subject of representation. It would be a severe mistake, however, to take the critical thrust of Fluck’s article on the emotional threshold between realism and modernism as a final assessment of the failure of American realism based on a history of the decline of realism as a mode of self-inspection and self-criticism. What is at stake in realism’s “tenuous relation to the representation of emotions” (Fluck, “Threshold,” 145) is more than just an aesthetic program or a practice of evidentiary documentation of emotional states. What is at stake is the general leading hypothesis of an emotionally grounded form of subjectivity, the presupposition, in fact, that there is a subject which may only be realized and articulated most fully through art and fiction if they find adequate and just forms of expressing and articulating the subject. If art and fiction would give up on this presupposition, the resulting representations would and could no longer serve as forms of self-reflection or self-affirmation. Maybe what ultimately defines realism’s tenuous relation to the representation of emotions is exactly the tension between the presupposition of full subjectivity and the awareness of the limits of its representation to adequately come to terms with what it nevertheless has to continue to presuppose. A general definition of realism thus may have to include both an affirmation and a denial: While it may insist that its mode of representation will do more justice to the subject and its experience than any other form of representation, it also will have to admit and acknowledge that it can never do full justice to the subject and the experience it wants to represent. It is no accident - at least for me - that one can actually 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0010 A Feel for the Real: Realism, Observation, and Emotional Identification 157 find such a definition of a general form of realism in another essay of Fluck’s: “Fiction and Justice.” In his description of the “articulation effect” he talks about the actual gratification which fiction provides yet which also works as a “source of a never-ending dissatisfaction”: “The reason lies in the inherent inadequacy of representation. We can only speak through the linguistic codes and signs that are available for expression, but these will never fully express our interiority.” Yet this dissatisfaction, “this discrepancy” does not stop us in our attempts to find adequate forms for expressing our full interiority: it “keeps communication going; it is the ever-renewed source of our search for articulation” (Fluck, “Fiction and Justice” 26). As ever so often, Fluck’s salient observation of this fundamental and productive tension at the heart of our search for adequate self-representation finds its most poignant and plausible expression in the accompanying footnote where he writes: “When we have the sense, as we almost always have, that we have not managed to express everything we meant, this discrepancy becomes obvious. The phrase “I love you” may be the supreme example of a discrepancy between interiority and representation” (Fluck, “Fiction and Justice” 38n20). This then may be the reason why realism’s relation to the representation of emotions was and must remain tenuous since, at the end, we may have to admit that while we try to do justice to what we love by finding adequate forms of expression we will never fully succeed. But at the same time, this will only make us want to continue the conversation. Works Cited Fluck, Winfried. “Fiction and Justice.” New Literary History 34.1 (2003): 19-42. Hughes, Robert. American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America. New York: Knopf, 1997. James, Henry. Washington Square. The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James. Ed. Gert Buelens and Susan M. Griffin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2022. Schneck, Peter. Bilder der Erfahrung: Kulturelle Erfahrung im Amerikanischen Realismus. Frankfurt: Campus, 1999. ---. “Cognitive Style and Perceptual Skill in the Realism of Thomas Eakins: Pragmatism, Cognitive Science and Art.” Amerikastudien / American Studies 58.2 (2013): 213-234. ---. “Henry James and the Creative Process: The Stewpot of the Imagination.” Secrets of Creativity: What Neuroscience, the Arts, and Our Minds Reveal. Ed. Suzanne Nalbantian and Paul M. Matthews. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019. 239-258. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0010 158 Peter Schneck