Realism fantasy

After World War II, photography as an art form took two directions. Some photographers turned from realism to abstraction and fantasy, as seen in the work of Minor White (1908-1976) and Bill Brandt (1904-1983). Others, such as Robert Frank (1924- ), used realism and words to portray a personal view of American culture. 

The choice between realism and fantasy will help the storyteller determine how to employ the other storytelling elements devices such as surprises and twists and turns of plot are even more important in fantasy. The narrative devices are the writer s tools. In choosing a realist approach, the author opts for character devices in fantasy, he or she opts for plot-oriented devices. Realistic story forms, such as melodrama, rely on identification with the character. They succeed or fail depending on the effectiveness of that identification. Fantasy is usually effective around a "moral" or a fantastic journey. In fantasy, plot is more crucial than identification with the character. 

Realism suggests that a balloon can t be human and that slavish devotion to a wardrobe is either extreme anxiety or sheer madness. An antirealistic approach, on the other hand, tolerates the humanized balloon and the devotion to a dresser. When a balloon becomes the stand-in for a human, the discovery of the little boy in each of us is not far behind. Fantasy in the plot is the first prerequisite in creating a character who is both a type and an archetype. 

In genres such as the fable and the parable, the balance between realism and fantasy is the challenge for the writer. Here too the dialogue is critical, to introduce that balance. If the language is too objectified, it will flatten out the fantastic dimension of the parable if the language is too passionate, too subjective, it will also undermine the parable, by seeming to be too much from the viewpoint of the particular character. 

The fairy-tale structure of the three women, representing three novelists, each with a story to tell (rather like the three Marys who appear in A Room of One s Own, or the three begging letters in Three Guineas), is buried in the final version of How Should One Read a Book , leaving just a trace behind.But the essay has emerged from a story which is itself an exploratory refusal to choose between different species fantasy or fact, realism or romance, essay or fiction. 

Typicality meant that life must be depicted in the forms of life itself (this is why Socialist Realism did not tolerate any form of non-realism, fantasy, or play). But this was a particular kind of verisimilitude. Everything that the authorities deemed atypical (economic hardship, difficult living conditions, not to mention political repression) - that did not produce a sense of revolutionary development or promote social mobilization - was... 

Although they did not offer more radical forms of opposition directed at the system itself, these writers resistance to the conservative aesthetic paradigms of socialist realism was often understood to reflect deeper deviations from the party line, which called for unambiguous partisanship, ready comprehensibility, and optimism in art and Hterature. An assertion of aesthetic autonomy - be it in the employment of satire, fantasy, allegory, parody, or proscribed modernist forms - could be read as tantamount to a contradiction of the party s authority to control and delimit discussion of its... 

---