Who’s afraid of realism?

What’s the difference between realism and the real? James Wood look at novels and short stories from Flaubert and Dostoevsky up to contemporary writers including Amit Chaudhuri and Gwendoline Riley as he examines the uncertain line between artifice and artificiality and the techniques and effects used in fiction to achieve the lifelike. James Wood is a contributor to the London Review of Books, staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. His books include ‘How Fiction Works’, ‘The Fun Stuff’ and ‘The Broken Estate’. Non-subscribers will only hear extracts from the episodes. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Books featured in the series: Gustav Flaubert, Madame Bo

Who’s afraid of realism? is a arts podcast hosted by London Review of Books, with 9 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

London Review of Books hosts Who’s afraid of realism?, a arts show with 9 episodes published.

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  Episode #6

  ‘Mrs Dalloway’ by Virginia Woolf

  May 27, 202620 minS0

  <p>In August 1923, halfway through writing ‘Mrs Dalloway’, Virginia Woolf recorded a new idea in her diary: she would ‘dig out beautiful caves’ behind her characters, and ‘the caves shall connect, and each comes to daylight at the present moment’. This was Woolf’s ‘tunnelling process’, a transformative approach that led to the novel's celebrated modernist innovations, with its depiction a group of circulating consciousnesses in London over the course of one day. But underlying these innovations are the techniques of 19th-century realism, and in this episode James Wood explores what Woolf owes to Dickens and Flaubert, and the ways she breaks down th...

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  Episode #5

  ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ by Leo Tolstoy

  Apr 27, 202623 minS0

  <p>In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his short autobiographical book ‘A Confession’, finished in 1880, he questioned what meaning there is in life that is not annihilated by the inevitability of death. His answer was to live according to God’s law, a realisation that shaped that rest of his life and writing, and guides the story of his late masterpiece, ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ (1886).</p> <p>To discuss ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich‘ and its place both in Tolstoy’s work and the developm...

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  Episode #4

  Three stories by Anton Chekhov

  Mar 30, 202623 minS0

  <p>‘Instead of sheets – dirty tablecloths.’ The notebooks of Anton Chekhov are full of enigmatic observations such as this, the unexplained details that suggest a whole scene, short story or character. When asked by an actor how he should play the role of Trigorin in The Seagull, Chekhov simply answered: ‘he wears checked trousers’. As James Wood argues, this mastery of the telling detail is central to Chekhov’s radical realism. Unlike Flaubert and Ibsen, Chekhov sought to avoid imposing authorial meaning or irony, instead handing over perception to his characters. In this episode, James looks at three of Chekhov’s stories, ‘Gus...

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  Episode #3

  ‘Notes from Underground’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Mar 1, 202620 minS0

  <p>Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella doesn’t contain the descriptive detail, impersonal narration or many other features of 19th-century realism established by Flaubert. The book’s two-part structure, which starts with a 40-year-old’s furious rant against rationalism and moves on to present three humiliating episodes from his earlier life, offers no kind of conclusion. Instead, it is the unbearable moments of psychological truth that make ‘Notes from Underground’ a revolutionary development in the history of realism.</p> <p>In this episode, James Wood is joined by the novelist and critic Adam Thirlwell to consider Dostoevsky’s mastery of the inner life and the e...

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  Episode #2

  ‘Madame Bovary’ by Gustave Flaubert (part two)

  Feb 1, 202610 minS0

  <p>‘He opened him up and found nothing.’ These are the doctor’s findings at Charles Bovary’s autopsy near the end of 'Madame Bovary'. Taken on its own, it’s a simple medical observation. In the context of Emma Bovary’s tragic story, it serves as a condemnation not just of Charles’s emptiness but the whole provincial world Flaubert has been describing.</p> <p>In the second part of his analysis of ‘Madame Bovary’, James Wood considers the major episodes leading to Emma’s death and argues that what made Flaubert’s realism dangerous was not its depictions of infidelity, but its...

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