Literary Realism Reconsidered from an 18th-Century Perspective 293 Literary Realism Reconsidered from an 18 th -Century Perspective Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz und Christian P� Weber East Tennessee State University and Florida State University Realism as a literary movement of the nineteenth century is governed by aesthetic premises that are considered in strict opposition to the classicist ideas on art and literature� Accordingly, Erich Auerbach famously traces realism in genres of the middle style, rather than in the grand style supposedly favored in classicist aesthetics. “However different medieval and modern realism may be, they are at one in this basic attitude” - and this attitude is characterized by the desire to constitute a close proximity to the experience of reality, as an “imitation of life” (Auerbach, Mimesis 554—55)� Beyond this shift in terms of style, realism was associated with the emergence of ‘things,’ the transient and consumable objects of everyday life that fill luxurious apartments in Paris, just as much as working class dwellings in London, or cluttered attics in Adalbert Stifter’s Waldviertel, as Peter Brooks recently demonstrated in Realist Vision � This focus on the material conditions of the protagonists’ life comes with an increasing appreciation of description as “a visual inspection of the world of phenomena and a detailed report on it” (Brooks 16). In France and in England, the realist novel was eminently political, exploring and exposing the new class divisions generated by the socioeconomic dynamics unleashed by nineteenth-century capitalism� In contrast, the German-speaking contemporaries of Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac, or Flaubert - Stifter, Droste-Hülshoff, Keller, Gotthelf, Storm, Raabe, and Fontane, to name just the most prominent - are commonly labeled under the rubric “poetischer Realismus” (literary realism) or “bürgerlicher Realismus” (bourgeoise realism), without, however, forming a coherent literary group with a distinct aesthetic program. In the excellent introduction to his edition of contemporaneous statements to a Theorie des bürgerlichen Realismus , Gerhard Plumpe notes a remarkable discrepancy between a sober realism in German politics (Bismarck’s so-called “Realpolitik”) as well as, one should add, in the sciences (note, for example, von Helmholtz’s and du Bois-Reymond’s debunking of Goethe’s Theory of Colors as unscientific) on the one side and the continued reverence for the speculative idealistic aesthetics in the vain of Schil- 294 Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz und Christian P� Weber ler, Schelling, and Hegel: “Der literarische Realismus war die Kompensation des politischen Realismus” (Plumpe 16; see also Preisendanz 68—91). As a result, the novels and novellas of German realism of this time are still driven by the idealist impetus to create an entire literary cosmos of harmonious relations governed by the poetic spirit - often represented by an intra-diegetic narrator. In the words of Otto Ludwig’s characterization of “Der poetische Realismus,” arguably the most programmatic statement of this literary ‘movement’: Es ist eine ganze Welt; in Geschlossenheit so mannigfaltig, wie das Stück wirklicher Welt, das wir kennen. […] Eine Welt, die in der Mitte steht zwischen der objektiven Wahrheit in den Dingen und dem Gesetze, das unser Geist hineinzulegen gedrungen ist, eine Welt, aus dem, was wir von der wirklichen Welt erkennen, durch das in uns wohnende Gesetz wiedergeboren. […] Dem Naturalisten ist es mehr um die Mannigfaltigkeit zu tun, dem Idealisten mehr um die Einheit� Diese beiden Richtungen sind einseitig, der künstlerische Realismus vereinigt sie in einer künstlerischen Mitte. (qtd. in Plumpe 149) From an eighteenth-century perspective, as we shall discuss later, this definition of “literary realism” is problematic, because already Goethe and the Romantic writers experienced reality itself as ‘poietic,’ that is, consisting of a variety of dynamism governed by intrinsic laws. But if, for now, we consider realism in general with Ludwig as a form of writing that aims for a mimetic representation of ‘reality’ (or life, in Auerbach’s sense) between the tension-filled poles of materialism and idealism, the German realism of the nineteenth century certainly leans more toward the latter side of this pairing. This is also the case with another fundamental dialectic at work in realism between aisthetic perception and poietic construction. Accordingly, there exist two basic types of realism. As a first point of orientation, we discuss a paradigmatic literary example from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century for each type� Already a generation or two before the term “literary realism” was coined, Goethe, the self-defined “arch-realist,” struggled throughout his poetic (and scientific) career to find a balanced vantage point from which to implement a realist poetics. In the “Vorspiel auf dem Theater” of Faust , for instance, the jester articulates a realist position that merges the poet’s idealist vision with the archetypical theater manager’s material interest in a spectacle for the masses: Drum seid nur brav und zeigt euch musterhaft, Laßt Phantasie, mit allen ihren Chören, Vernunft, Verstand, Empfindung, Leidenschaft, Doch, merkt euch wohl! nicht ohne Narrheit hören. (FA 7/ 1: 16; ll. 85—88) Greift nur hinein in’s volle Menschenleben! Literary Realism Reconsidered from an 18th-Century Perspective 295 Ein jeder lebt’s, nicht vielen ist’s bekannt, Und wo ihr’s packt, da ist’s interessant. In bunten Bildern wenig Klarheit, Viel Irrtum und ein Fünkchen Wahrheit, So wird der beste Trank gebraut, Der alle Welt erquickt und auferbaut. (ll. 167—73) These are, no doubt, defining lines also for Goethe’s realist poetics, so that we may, provisory, characterize his realist attitude as one that engages with the world in a direct manner, one that finds greater interest in ‘colorful images’ than in an abstract truth, that mobilizes all human faculties in an attempt to grasp the fullness of human life, and that strives to emulate the attractive forces of love for the creation of a poetic representation that, in turn, is authentic, exemplary ( musterhaft ), colorful and interesting enough to both please and edify a captivated audience. When Goethe, however, closes his Faust by conceding the merely allegorical character of the historical world while evoking the creating force in the “Unzulängliche” and “Unbeschreibliche” (ll. 12104—111), he explicitly ends on the note that true progress and creation (the “exemplary” work) can be expected only from a point inaccessible to us, echoing his Romantic contemporaries; thus, the “volle Menschenleben” is a necessary but not sufficient condition for poetry� Goethe, in Faust as well as in his entire career as a writer, instead seems to point to what Schelling posited as the point of indifference between subject and object ( Indifferenzpunkt ) as the origin of poetic creation� His metaphor of the ‘Augen des Geistes’ points to the productive event that cannot be sufficiently explained and represented - neither by a materialist and idealist nor by a plain realist poetics� Providing an example for the second type of poetic realism at the intersection between aisthetic perception and poietic construction, Goethe’s poem “Maifest” (FA 1: 129—30) performs with theoretical acuity and poetological reflexivity the processual transformation of an aesthetic experience into the poetic event embodied by the poem itself. At the beginning, the lyric speaker expresses the immediacy of this aesthetic experience in a joyful exclamation: “Wie herrlich leuchtet / Mir die Natur! ” But these opening lines are ambivalent; the lyrical voice seems to feel simultaneously elated (“ wie herrlich leuchtet / Mir die Natur” - as if the lyrical subject has been chosen by nature) and overwhelmed (“wie herrlich leuchtet / [m]ir die Natur ” - the noun subject dominates grammatically the dative pronoun). This results in an internal tension: the male speaker feels now hard-pressed to make himself heard and express how he feels as he experiences the awakening of spring nature at the sunrise, the general festive mood of the songs and dances at the May celebration, and specifically the love for a 296 Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz und Christian P� Weber girl with whom the speaking subject is participating in this action, apparently dancing with her. (The poem’s prosody mimics the rhythm of the folk dances popular at these village spring festivities.) He is certainly lacking concepts and literally gasping for words - as the enumeration of nouns coupled with interjections (“O Erd’, o Sonne! / O Glück, o Lust! ”) makes evident - to articulate precisely how magnificent this May festival is in his experience� Only the complete poem in its entirety documents how the affected subject has come to terms about the love he feels at that moment: “Wie ich dich liebe” / “Wie du mich liebst! ” But how , precisely, can the charged reality of the spring awakening and blossoming mutual love be transfixed by dead letters without fading away; how can the subjective emotions and aesthetic experiences be mediated through language into a poetic event? This mystery is revealed in the enigmatic center of the poem, in the fifth out of total nine stanzas, which seems to be superfluous in terms of action but marks the very act of literary transposition: “Du segnest herrlich / Das frische Feld, / Im Blütendampfe / Die volle Welt.” Without venturing into a detailed analysis - for example determining the referent of the suddenly appearing “Du” that may be relating back either to the evocation of “love” in the lines before, or foreshadowing the “girl” addressed in the next stanza, or represent the spirit loci as a cumulative poetic genius emerging from the totality of this experience -, this stanza enacts the moment of poetic (re)creation: the “You” performs the benediction over a “fresh field” that has emerged from the chaos of impressions and the turmoil of expressed emotions; it suddenly lies in front of the lyric subject like a clean sheet of white paper, ready to be inscribed by the “vapor of blossoms,” an ethereal, fluid medium into which the concrete physical, yet aesthetically charged reality of the “full world” has dissolved for the beginning of another creation - or, rather, transfiguration - through the poetic spirit. (This interpretation obviously favors the third of the presented options to identify the “You.”) This spirit captures the aesthetic atmosphere and mood (“Stimmung”) and manifests itself as poetic by employing performative verbs of dynamic action (“leuchten,” “glänzen,” “lachen,” “dringen,” “segnen,” “lieben”) and emotionally charged, increasingly abstract nouns (“O Erd’, o Sonne! / O Glück, o Lust! / / O Lieb’, o Liebe! ”); by creating harmonious sound patterns through rhythm and rhymes; by evoking the idea of cosmic unity and identity through constructive analogies and similes (“ So liebt die Lerche […] Wie ich dich liebe”); last but not least by arousing a sense of endless potentiality through ambiguously polyvalent words like the mentioned “Du” in the stanza at the poem’s center. All these poetic means mimic the specific quality of aesthetic sensations and sentiments that lie far beyond the regular capacity of expression in the language’s use of conceptual representation or discursive argumentation� Literary Realism Reconsidered from an 18th-Century Perspective 297 Both examples, the short poem of 36 lines and the epic drama of more than 12,000, employ literary strategies of realism with their ambition to represent the “volle Welt” at the May Festival or the “volle Menschenleben” of a tour de force through human history that expands “vom Himmel durch die Welt zur Hölle” (l. 242) in the panoramic vision of Faust . Both literary works transgress the accountable ‘factual’ reality either by exploring intuitively the (contingent) potentialities of past and future events or by reconfiguring poetically the transcending qualities of an aesthetic experience; at the same time, however, they remain grounded in whatever reality they have emerged from, although the original concrete life situation or experience is enhanced and (trans)formed by the mediating poetic spirit of the artist. As such, both poetic works maintain an implicit character of realism beyond the formal subjectivism (or dogmatic idealism) with which the artist rendered them. (Another striking example presents Auerbach’s reading of the Commedia as a work of realism in Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt .) Their inherent transparency make these works of literary realism accessible for the experiences of other subjects, which explains their general popularity with readers: Faust’s inner struggles represent the conditionedness of modern humans in general, and any reader will be easily transported into the very epicenter of the aesthetic experience from which the “Maifest” has emerged. Literary realism presents changes in the world and transformations within the subject as more ‘real’ as they could have been observed in the factual, conceptual reality of social history or experienced by an ordinary individual� These two very different, yet still similar examples of literary realism from Faust and “Maifest” by the same author suggest that it is not sufficient to define the realism of a particular time period and to distinguish it then from other varieties of realism. In fact, when we speak of realism around 1800, we do not aim to denote a specific aesthetic program but rather wish to point out that, beginning with the 1770s, many different realisms have emerged that served different functions vis-à-vis different fields of reality without ever disproving or making ultimately obsolete other preceding or competing approaches to realism. When it comes to the modes in which writers constituted reality and thus realism, a strict historiographic distinction between Classicism, Romanticism, and Realism is misleading, even though the overall constitution and function of poetry certainly differed substantially in 1850 from what the later eighteenth century conceived of as the purpose of literature. Against this backdrop, Dirk Göttsche and Nicholas Saul, for instance, recently demonstrated the “continued fascination of Realist writers […] by the uncanny and supernatural, and the legacy of Romantic motifs, characters, themes, narrative devices - and even arguments - in Realist narrative” (Göttsche and Saul 11). Hence, we do not wish to restrict the use of “poetic realism” to denote just a certain (and only vague- 298 Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz und Christian P� Weber ly defined) realist style of German novelistic writing between 1840 and 1900. Instead, poetic realism, as it turns out, can be made a very productive term for describing Goethe’s poetic and scientific epistemology, as Christian P. Weber’s contribution demonstrates� Following the recent example of Veronika Thanner, Joseph Vogl, and Dorothea Walzer (esp. 9—11), we suggest broadening the field of literary/ poetic realism as a term that comprises a wider range of literary responses to a ‘reality’ that has become problematic, ever since the Enlightenment took hold. Realism always refers to reality of some kind and explores various poetic strategies to represent at least certain aspects of it� Since reality is conceived of as increasingly dynamic and complex, consisting of simultaneous actions and triggering events of eternal change, any observer can only assume a relative viewpoint from which they have to determine what is essential enough to record. Consequently, a literary narrator must decide how to represent things and actions within the conflicting parameters listed above. This certainly has prompted various theories of poetic mimesis throughout the ages, but at a time when reality itself was conceived of more as an open context rather than as something guaranteed and disclosable (Blumenberg 52), the problem became particularly prevalent� In this regard, it is no coincidence that both the literature of the Age of Goethe and Realism proper - and one certainly could add Modernism in this list as well - were preoccupied with the blurriness of perception and principles of uncertainty (Thanner et al. 10), as it is here that the transient natures of both perceiving subjects and perceived objects intersect� Although it was not uncomplex from Antiquity through the Middle Ages, the concept of reality for many centuries at least was grounded in ontological, metaphysical, and theological principles that to some extent allowed for predictable and authoritative claims of truth; gradual differences of completion and perfection did not contradict the conviction of a unified nature. Hence, reality itself, the physical existence as it appears to the senses, was generally not doubted - everything belonged to (the same) being/ Being. With the transcendental Kantian revolution, however, reality has become a double and thus problematic; no longer just the objects that stimulate the senses to perceive, reality was now conceived an activity of the subject, a quality of cognition as the product of both sense perception and conceptual recognition. As Kant poignantly phrases: “Ohne Sinnlichkeit würde uns kein Gegenstand gegeben, und ohne Verstand keiner gedacht werden. Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind” (KrV, B 75). This cognitive reality excludes an objective and exhaustive recording of things because all sense perceptions are preconfigured by the forms of intuition (time and space) and processed a priori according to innate faculties (categories and principles) of the human mind; consequently, Literary Realism Reconsidered from an 18th-Century Perspective 299 humans have no access to ‘things as such.’ Conversely, cognitive reality cannot be entirely subjective, because everything imagined derives to some extent, at least, from intuition and thus has a material foundation� Instead, humans shape reality first and foremost based on the pure concepts of the mind but then also based on the concepts of experience and accumulated knowledge. Kant’s notion of reality is thus a dynamic arrangement of a world that individuals are constantly rearranging by adjusting concepts to the changing conditions of their senseand world-making. This epistemic shift, along with subsequent shifts implemented by Romanticism and Modernism, had an enormous impact on realist literature because its object, reality, is now marked by a similar dialectic between perception and conceptual application as in the endeavors of literary representation between mimetic description and poietic narration/ construction. Reality, as a product of the understanding and a historical amalgam of cultural self-understanding, becomes itself a domain with agency. It presents itself, then, as something intrinsically dynamic. As a mimetic literary strategy, realism must reconcile with this greatly enhanced potentiality of reality� In fact, the end of the eighteenth century has witnessed the emergence of multiple realities. It is not just the human mind that constructs cognition through an “epigenesis of pure reason” (KrV, B 167); many other entities are discovered to have creative potential and display dynamic agency as well. The fact that Kant borrows the concept of epigenesis - promoted first by the physiologist Caspar Friedrich Wolff in 1759 as a generative alternative to the preformationist theory of organic development - from the discourse of the newly emerging life sciences as an analogy for the inherent dynamism of his transcendental conception of human cognition, indicates the acknowledgment of the existence of other forces and separate agents with the capacity to form and develop autonomous systems. Kant seems to conceive of them as homologous within a common ontology, as this analogy suggests. Another field or system of reality that emerges in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries directly affects one of the two founding pillars of cognition, namely sense perception. Was perception for Kant primarily, as his privileged term “Anschauung” suggests, visual perception, his student Herder ventured out to challenge the hegemony of sight in favor of touch� In the treatise “Plastik” (1778), Herder distinguishes the specific qualities of these two senses, subordinating sight under touch: “In allen diesen Fällen ist das Gesicht nur eine verkürzte Formel des Gefühls � Die volle Form ist Figur , die Bildsäule ein flacher Kupferstich worden. Im Gesicht ist Traum , im Gefühl Wahrheit ” (250). Prior to Herder, Lessing distinguished in his seminal treatise on Winckelmann’s interpretation of the Laocoon statue between the specific capacities of the eye to see images simultaneously and of the ear to hear sounds synchronously� Based 300 Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz und Christian P� Weber on this semiotic distinction, Lessing implemented a clear separation between painting, which should focus on the descriptive representation of the pregnant moment in a scenery, and poetry, which is meant to narrate the consecutive action of a plot with only as little injections of description as absolutely necessary. Consequently, the ‘realities’ of a painting and a poem or play must differ fundamentally because the prior is geared toward an acoustic and the latter toward a visual reception. Lessing’s great influence can be studied in the poem “Maifest,” for example, which is all action and almost no description. Goethe takes the idea of an autonomy of the senses or, rather, of one single sense organ another step further, now with direct implication for Kant’s transcendental epistemology� In his Farbenlehre , Goethe shifts the focus of examination and experimentation from the physics of light to the physiology of the eye. For him, the retina is the “Organ des Sehens überhaupt” (“Das Auge”; FA 23/ 2: 268), and he is mostly interested in phenomena that do not concern the recognition of objects, namely the merely subjective afterimages and optical illusions� In these non-referential phenomena Goethe detects the eye’s very own “interne[n] und elementare[n] Verarbeitungsprozess” (Vogl 115) which distinguishes it from the older conception of visual perception modeled after the reflective principle of the camera obscura . Goethe thus detects and explores “ein empirisches Feld vor oder jenseits aller Empirie,” one in which, in the words of his collaborator Purkinje that would prove Herder wrong, “auch der Schein zur Wahrheit wird” (Vogl 118). Johannes Müller formulates later, based on Goethe’s and Purkinje’s studies, the idea that each sense organ owns a specific energy and life with specific laws of processing sense data that are then compounded into more comprehensive schemas of intuition by the imagination. “Realismus,” Elisabeth Strowick comments in a recent study that makes this “uncanny” scientific approach productive for an interpretation of the many specters and ghosts that haunt many novellas of poetic realism proper, “macht sich gerade in der Trennung von Wahrnehmung und Referenz geltend. Realität ist Wahrnehmungseffekt, Effekt des ‘Eigenlebens’ der Sinne, die den grundsätzlichen Simulakrum-Charakter des Wirklichen artikulieren” (4). This is, of course, only one way to conceive of reality and thus realism around 1800� The Eigenleben of each of the senses (not to mention the multiple instruments of optical media with the ability to manipulate human vision like the microscope and telescope that were made productive in Romantic tales such as Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann ), of the cognitive impulse, and of the various life forces in the physical domain forms in each instance only one possible reality out of many; still more poietic fields of reality have emerged during the eighteenth century. We can address these only cursorily here but will provide more elaboration at concrete literary examples later� Literary Realism Reconsidered from an 18th-Century Perspective 301 The imagination, the reproductive and productive faculty of the human mind, stands at the center of his transcendental-philosophical project, unfettered from theological constraints and accused of acting rampant, before the judge of reason that wishes to dictate the laws in order to contain it. Kant’s first two Critiques are concerned with the making and legitimacy of these laws, whereas the third Critique of the Power of Judgment grants the imagination in its poetic, schematizing capacity some liberty to play freely with the conceptual understanding in acts of reflective judgment, themselves triggered by aesthetic experiences. Romantic philosophy - inspired by Spinoza’s concept of natura naturans ; Schiller’s dialectics of a rational “Formtrieb” and a sensuous “Stofftrieb” synthesized by a poietic-aisthetic, essentially ‘realistic’ “Spieltrieb”; and particular Fichte’s notion of a self-positing ego - identified the faculty of the human imagination with creativity per se, as if it were a cosmic force of creation. For Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and Tieck, as Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz’s contribution shows, the imagination is the constituting factor of (any) reality; the genius artist, in analogy to God Creator, is the one who can (trans)form (a) reality according to the idea motivating him. In the Romantic artwork, this idea should shimmer through as an ideal that can never be reached or fulfilled so that this intrinsic poesy perpetually stimulates the imagination to aesthetic reflections. The Romantics considered such an artwork the most realistic of all because it contains and reflects the very poetic conditionedness to which it owes its existence, like any other thing that is truly ‘real’ through its capacity to form its own reality. Objects of ‘reality’ par excellence in this Romantic sense were the ruins and fragments of antiquity that archeologists unearthed and art historians, Winckelmann being the first and foremost among them, attempted to make sense of by (re)constructing the idealized context of ancient Greek or Roman culture. These ruins and the associated agencies of their reconstruction developed their own historical dynamism by shaping visions of a golden past, turning into utopian imperatives to reform the cultures at home according to these models (see the article by Christian P. Weber). The old “Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes” was fought particularly fervently during the eighteenth century, which was also an age of revolutions. Particularly the French Revolution with outrageously horrible acts of terror between the Ancien Regime and Napoleon’s unprecedented rise to power who won, like a force of world history, battle after battle in indescribably violent Revolutionary Wars, posed incredible challenges to reckon with this out-of-order reality to any observer. As Christine Lehleiter’s contribution shows, perhaps none struggled more with these ruptures than the arch-realist Goethe who, returning from his Italian journey in 1788, thought to have figured out the intrinsic laws of physical nature, ancient arts, and hu- 302 Jan Oliver Jost-Fritz und Christian P� Weber man society. Daniel DiMassa’s contribution can show in his reading of Stifter’s novella “Bergkristall” along the lines of Schleiermacher’s early theology that even religion and the idea of God underwent existential vitalization and dynamization� Later, the nineteenth century added other domains of reality: the capitalist industrialization of the economy, technological inventions and innovations, and nationalist/ socialist movements led to large-scale social and societal changes that are the topic of many realist European and American novels of this time� We find many of these changes and transformations already addressed in the works of the late Goethe, especially in Faust. Part II and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre � But the fragmentary form of both literary texts indicates that these enormous transformations of the human living conditions can no longer be contained and represented within an organicist whole. Accordingly, Hegel rejected literature’s or any other artwork’s claim to be still able to capture ‘reality’ in this functionally differentiated modern world, culminating in the thesis of the “end of art” (see Plumpe 9—10). Perhaps the major difference between the literary realism of the eighteenth and the one of the nineteenth century lies in the continued ambition of the latter to conceive of these newly emerging realities still as homologous entities that remain compatible within an overarching ontology - be this Christianity or Humanism - and to deal with them in one work or project, like Goethe’s Faust , whereas the former deals with them largely separately and within a national, sometimes regional or even local context� Authors of the nineteenth century still indebted to this eighteenth century realistic attitude, like Stifter, can adhere to the (now) lofty goal of human universalism only at the expense of actively repressing the ‘monstrosities’ of the new realities creeping up and disrupting old living habits. By doing so, Stifter nonetheless engages with the reality of new realities in an allegorical gesture of rejection that foreshadows modernist attitudes, as Robert Mottram shows in his interpretation of “Kalkstein.” In the following considerations, we trace some of these poietic tendencies to circumscribe the increased complexity of the playing field “reality” around 1800 to which literary realism responds by developing new or rediscovering old rhetoric devices and poetic strategies for a mimetic representation that aims to do justice to the dynamization, multiplication, and ambiguation of reality� By presenting some interpretative vignettes of literary responses to the new fields of reality emerging in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we aim to demonstrate that authors commonly not associated with Realism, authors from Winckelmann and Goethe to Tieck and Stifter, share a common aesthetic approach to reality for which the label “realism” applies (at least) just as well as for the group of the nineteenth-century novelists commonly known by this Literary Realism Reconsidered from an 18th-Century Perspective 303 designation� We propose a reconsideration of realism as a literary practice of minute and patient observation combined with imaginative, even experimental techniques of writing. This realism is propelled by the aim to reconcile the complications of an ever more complex reality with the poetic challenge of a more adequately mimetic representation which affects all literary genres� All realistic literary endeavors from the late eighteenth century onwards have in common a reflection on the status of their own poetic reality in the wider context of the epistemological foundation and historical situation outlined above� Works Cited Auerbach, Erich� Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2013� ---� Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt. With an afterword by Kurt Flasch. Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2001. Blumenberg, Hans. “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans.” Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften . Ed. Anselm Haverkamp. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2001. 47—73. Brooks, Peter. Realist Vision . New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang� Sämtliche Werke. Ed. Hendrik Birus et al. Frankfurt a. 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