This chapter examines the ‘peculiar’ utopian temporality of the contemporary moment as expressed in the fictional works of three Black British female writers: Queenie (2019), by Candace Carty-Williams, Swing Time (2016) by Zadie Smith, and Girl, Woman, Other (2019) by Bernadine Evaristo. The chapter argues that these novels represent a particular incarnation of utopian realism. This names a strong commitment in contemporary British fiction to articulating post-racial futures. In utopian realist texts, writers use realism not to convey mimetic depictions of the present here and now but, rather, to convince readers of the viability of alternative, transformed futures. Utopian realists such as Candace Carty-Williams, Zadie Smith, Bernadine Evaristo, Monica Ali, and Diana Evans foreground a relationship between utopian thinking and models drawn from personal and historic experience. Like design fictions, the term given for fictional narratives used by designers of prototype products and technologies to help imagine their future use, these texts offer readers identifiable utopian alternatives to contemporary Britain. Shaped in relation to the long history of Black experience in the United Kingdom, as well as gender and queerness, these novels reveal the need to consider the future not as a speculative possibility but a realisable plan for how we might live.

This chapter considers Doris Lessing’s engagement with utopia, from the Children of Violence series which is set in 1950s–60s London to her near-future ecocatastrophic Mara and Dann novels (1999, 2005). The necessity of utopian hope in Lessing’s novels is set against a seeming disavowal of the possibility of positive systemic change. Utopian possibility in Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series (1979–83), for instance, is driven by cosmic patterns rather than human action. Similarly, her excoriating descriptions of colonial and capitalist life in the Children of Violence series (1952–69) possess an energy that can be considered utopian. However, the apocalyptic strain in many of Lessing’s works renders this utopianism highly ambivalent. In their critique of societal progress or political change at scale, Lessing’s novels often sit at odds with the literary utopian tradition. In Lessing’s works, read alongside American contemporaries such as Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, the prefigurative mode is less concretely utopian. Enclaves of survivors persist, but the texts indicate that political struggle will return with each generation and the same problems recur across history. The chapter concludes that Lessing’s late ecocatastrophic fictions exhibit a stronger utopian impulse, which resonates with twenty-first-century discussions of the climate emergency in the United Kingdom.

Chapter 1, “Introduction,” welcomes you to day 1 of your new life as an upgrader. In this introduction we not only provide an overview of the book’s thesis for better problem solving and more effective technological advancement, we start to draw out the contours of what it means to be an Upgrader. This loosely nit cohort of changemakers has rejected both the inadequacy of the status quo and the destructiveness of innovation. Here, you’ll begin to learn what it means to solve some of the most urgent problems facing our society today through the lens of upgrades. We’ll also begin to provide examples of ways that innovations have fallen flat, or blown up completely, in the past. Crucially, upgraders aren’t just backseat drivers in the journey of social change, they are forward looking experts who are often able to see the dangers of pending innovations before they occur. In your life as an upgrader, you’ll not only be able to avoid these missteps yourself, but you’ll be able to see the innovation traps so many others are poised to fall into.

Chapter 4 begins by tracing some reappearances and interconnections of Emersonian themes, in what Goodman calls paths of coherence in Emerson’s philosophy: not a complete system, but ways that his thoughts hang together. The chapter focuses on “Nominalist and Realist,” where Emerson sets out the competing metaphysics of particulars and universals without reconciling their opposition. Near the end of the essay, he draws a skeptical lesson from his epistemology of moods. “I am always insincere,” he writes, “as always knowing there are other moods.” This might be cause for despair, but Emerson’s tone in this final paragraph is more in tune with ancient skepticism and Montaigne. He ends “Nominalist and Realist” by withdrawing from the dispute, but this does not mean that he gives up inquiring. Skepticism can be both a withholding of final judgment, and, as Herwig Friedl observes, “a constant looking around, without any attempt at closure.”

The human standpoint and what sets it apart from the standpoint of non-rational animals is discussed. Some distinctions are also drawn between “lower” and “higher" representations of objects in terms of how much they involve of the cognitive apparatus. Additionally, it is discussed briefly how the human standpoint contrasts with the God’s eye viewpoint of traditional metaphysics. This brings us to a distinctive framework for empirical cognition of objects, namely, space and time as human forms of intuition – rather than God’s absolute “sensoria,” as in Isaac Newton. The framework gives rise to the distinction between appearances and things in themselves that comes with Kant’s Copernican turn. However, what is to be defended in subsequent chapters is a special variety of direct realism in philosophy of perception, and, thus, a deflated version of the “transcendental” side of Kant’s position. Even within mere empirical realism, with transcendental idealism bracketed, space can be seen as a form of perceiving, in so far as perceptual content is organized in a space-like manner and mirrors the layout of a spatial, perceived scene.

Lukács engaged in a series of exchanges with his contemporaries on the Left, including Bloch and Brecht, in which he defended realism as the only valid form of the novel, and they promoted modernism. This debate helps us to see the value and the limitations of the realist form and the need for other forms of fictional narrative. The representation of the future under climate change would seem to be something beyond realism’s grasp because such a radically different world is by definition far outside the quotidian. And yet, climate change is itself a reality that fiction would seem to be obliged to address. in The Great Derangement (2016), Amitav Ghosh tries to explain why fiction has failed to address the problem of climate change, and he blames the novel as a form. Ghosh wants fiction that embodies a posthumanist perspective, but the novel form is dependent on human agency. A variety of novels address climate change, and most combine realism with other narrative modes. Realism is needed in order to make these novels persuasive, though it is unlikely, given the current reach of print fiction, that a climate novel will have the inpact that Uncle Tom’s Cabin once did.

Film theorists rewrote the history of cinema by claiming that standard Hollywood products, long regarded as patently unreal, escapist entertainment, were realist. The chapter shows how and why they were wrong, and it argues that there are significant inherent limitations that the medium of the commercial fiction film places on any attempt at realism, especially the standard theatrical running time. In order to do this, I focus on the films of Howard Hawks, whose films have been said to best illustrate what Robert Ray calls Hollywood’s invisible style. Hawks was used to illustrate classic Hollywood’s supposed illusionistic realism, which it was claimed allowed movies to disseminate all manner of ideological mischief. But one only need to pay attention to the films themselves to see that they don’t claim to be realist. Indeed, Hawks’s films often seem to be hermetically sealed off from ordinary life, ignoring the details of social relations in which realist narratives are grounded. In this he entirely typical of Hollywood film then and now. Finally, I look at Italian neorealism, the films of John Sayles, and other films that are more properly understood as realist.

The Wire is an example of the way that new technologies and methods of dissemination have made realism possible on television. Where broadcast TV required episodes that could be watched independently and that were structured by the need for commercial interruptions, pay networks such as HBO and the more recent streaming services allow for long-form narratives that develop over many weeks and stretch on for years. The Wire has been widely recognized for its realism, which, however, is usually equated with what is seen as the program’s accuracy. I show how it makes use of conventions of realism inherited from nineteenth century fiction, which are enabled by its structure as a long-form program. The Wire makes use of genres not typically associated with realism, including crime fiction (the police procedural), TV’s police melodramas, and the ancient genre of tragedy as a plot form in Hayden White’s sense. The series incorporates this variety of genres in the service of a vision of ordinary life that continually surprises the viewers. The Wire thus demonstrates the power of new forms of television to represent social complexity to a degree not found in media other than print.

The critique of realism dominant in the 1970s and 1980s should be understood in the context of the longer history of anti-realism that accompanied the rise of literary modernism. Misconceptions about realism deriving from three sources within the larger frame of discourse of French theory: the modernist rejection of realism as an outmoded form; general claims about language, representation, and knowledge, making it harder to see the validity of the realist project; explicit attacks on realism, which need to be read as an argument with Lukács and the version of Marxism he represented. It is my hypothesis that the conception of realism as an epistemological problem is rooted these three tendencies, and once those positions are no longer assumed, then it can be shown that realism entails no special epistemological pleading and does not offer or require any particular philosophy of knowledge. Questions regarding realism’s truth should (and, if fact usually do) turn on what is represented, rather than on the claim that it has been represented truthfully. Realism should be understood as a set of conventions that emerge in nineteenth- century fiction and which have been recognized by critics since at least the second half of the twentieth century.

In the Bosnian Crisis, coercion worked – both to get a state what it wanted and to prevent war. The crisis centers on a dispute between Austria–Hungary and Russia over a deal that concerns Bosnia. When things went awry and the threat of war arose, Germany presented the tsar with an ultimatum. Because Russia was still too weak after its defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, the tsar necessarily relented. He vowed privately, however, that he would never be humiliated in the face of a threat again; next time, he would not back down. Six years later (in 1914), he lived up to his vow. In accordance with the realist approach to international relations, this case shows that actors can successfully use coercion to address territorial disagreements (e.g., bring about territorial change) without that coercion leading to a war.

The Eastern Crisis is a nonwar case that occurs during the heyday of the Concert of Europe. Nevertheless, the major powers avoided war with one another not because of the Concert’s deliberations, but rather because of domestic politics within France. King Louis-Philippe reined in his hard-line prime minster, Thiers, thereby removing the threat of war. This indicates that domestic politics is more important than system structure, at least in this case. One major lesson we can derive from this case is that “someone must stand for peace” – that is, one way for actors to avoid war is for a strong leader to rein in domestic hard-liners.

Developments in magical realist critical discourse have benefited the study of African literature in several ways. The notion that there is no single point of origin for magical realism refocuses critical attention on African oral traditions, where the supernatural has long mingled with realist elements. And clarity over the nature and purposes of magical realism allows insight into how it simultaneously enables recuperation and critique. This essay considers the history of attempts to theorize magical realism in Africa, before turning to two often-neglected early exemplars of the mode, Thomas Mofolo and Daniel Fagunwa. Fagunwa’s countryman, Amos Tutuola, developed the African mode of magical realism in flamboyant ways, as did Ben Okri, and, later, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. In interpreting the work of Ngũgĩ the discussion circles back to global interlocutors like Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie because, like them, Ngũgĩ self-consciously deploys magical realism to facilitate satire and powerful political critique.

What are the categories: fundamental entities or concepts? Suárez answers this question by rejecting strong realism as well as conceptualism. On his view, the distinction of ten categories marks a conceptual distinction that is grounded in reality, but without there being a one-to-one relation between concepts and entities. Rather, the distinction is grounded in different things (res) as well as modes (modi) and in combinations of these two building blocks of reality. The chapter examines this grounding relation by first analyzing Suárez’s account of things and modes and the way they are related to each other. It then focuses on the categories of substance and quality and explains in what sense the concepts of substance and quality are grounded in things and modes. Finally, it argues that Suárez subscribes to a distinctive form of reductionism that differs from the standard nominalist approach to the categories.

Realism is one of many International Relations theories that attempt to understand and explain the way the international system functions in anarchy without any overarching government. It emphasizes the importance of individual states as the primary actors and decision makers within this system and argues that the most defining characteristics of all states include self-interested behavior and an inherent instinct to survive at any cost. The three main subcategories within realism are classical realism, neorealism (in its offensive and defensive variants), hegemonic realism and power-transition theories, and neoclassical realism.

Suárez holds that a predicated universal is an ens rationis, something properly regarded as an extrinsic denomination grounded in the intrinsic individual formal unities of mind- and language-independent res; he is thus a nominalist rather than a realist, where nominalism, although this term is variously understood in his period of philosophizing, denies the existence of anything beyond individuals. This conclusion has, however, been disputed, not least because Suárez’s approach is careful and highly nuanced. The main chore of this chapter is twofold: first, to show that he is indeed a nominalist and then, second, to explicate and assess the character of his nominalism, which will also perforce involve us, albeit only briefly, in reflecting on his reservations about accepting the existence of anything which is not an individual, which is to say, then, his motivations for rejecting realism about universals.

This chapter explores Leoš Janáček’s innovative and individualistic approach to opera, with a particular focus on his most frequently performed work, Jenůfa. Composed between 1894 and 1903, Jenůfa reflects Janáček’s interest in the concept of realism, influencing his choice of subject matter, the use of a prose text, and a compositional style rooted in spoken language. The chapter also discusses Janáček’s fascination with Gustave Charpentier’s 1900 opera Louise and its impact on Janáček’s musical language. Similar approaches can also be identified in Janáček’s other operas. The composer’s innovations encountered resistance within Czech musical circles, and it took more than a decade for them to receive even partial appreciation.