Cracked Realism
Abstract
This chapter argues that constitutional realism, financial realism, and aesthetic realism all work in the same way – they unify experience in a universal time that exists beyond any person or people. Britain is the paradigm of ‘capitalist realism’, indeed is capitalist realism, demanding a very high degree of adjustment of experience to public truth – something again familiar from the demands for personal performance in neoliberalism. And conversely self-determination can be understood as a conflict with realist time or universalist time, growing from the 1980s (the ‘Scottish Literary Renaissance’) through the 2010s – and the desire to build not from adjustment but from experience. In this sense the ’14 independence referendum can itself be understood fundamentally as an interruption of realist or universalist time.
Keywords
Universalist Time Student Loan Capitalist Realism Natural Reason Universal TermPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
- 1.Robert Miles (2002) ‘The 1790s: The effulgence of Gothic’, in ed. Jerrold E. Hogle, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 41–62.Google Scholar
- 2.Michael Gardiner (2012a) The Return of England in English Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 110–116.Google Scholar
- 3.cf. Ian Baucom (1999) Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).Google Scholar
- 4.William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2009) Lyrical Ballads (London: Routledge (1801–1802)), pp. 299–304.Google Scholar
- 5.A. V. Dicey (1979) An Introduction to the Law of the Constitution, p. 422, p. 441; cf. Michael Gardiner (2013) The Constitution of English Literature (London: Bloomsbury), pp. 61–62.Google Scholar
- 6.S.T. Coleridge (1830) On the Constitution of the Church and State According to the Idea of Each: Lay Sermons (London: Hurst, Chance and Co. (1829)), p. 3.Google Scholar
- 7.Francis Mulhern (1979) The Moment of Scrutiny (London: New Left Books), p. 257.Google Scholar
- 8.F.R. Leavis (2008) The Great Tradition (London: Faber (1948)), p. 14.Google Scholar
- 9.F.R. Leavis (1933) For Continuity (Cambridge: Gordon Fraser/Minority Press).Google Scholar
- 10.I.A. Richards (1924) The Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Kegan Paul); I.A. Richards (1929) Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (London: Kegan Paul).Google Scholar
- 11.T.S. Eliot (1999) ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber (1919)), p. 15.Google Scholar
- 12.On the inheritance from S.T. Coleridge, for example, in Statesman’s Manual (1816) and On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829), see Gardiner, The Constitution of English Literature, pp. 39–42.Google Scholar
- 13.wr. Willy Russell, dir. Lewis Gilbert (1983) Educating Rita (Acorn Pictures).Google Scholar
- 14.Edmund Burke (2009) Reflections on the Revolution in France (Oxford: Oxford University Press (1790)), p. 126, p. 157.Google Scholar
- 15.Alasdair Gray (2002) Lanark: A Life in 4 Books (Edinburgh: Canongate (1981)), pp. 243–244.Google Scholar
- 16.Virginia Woolf (1965) ‘Robinson Crusoe’, The Common Reader (Second Series) (London: Hogarth (1932)), pp. 51–58; Virginia Woolf (1968) ‘Defoe’, The Common Reader (First Series) (London: Hogarth (1925)), pp. 121–131.Google Scholar
- 17.Karl Marx trans. Ben Fowkes (1990) Capital: Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin (1867)), pp. 169–170.Google Scholar
- 18.Daniel Defoe (1799) History of the Union (Dublin: J. Exshaw (1709)), p. 59, p. 61.Google Scholar