Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature

The paradox at the heart of the return to realism in the interwar years, as seen in work by Moholy-Nagy, Brecht, and others.The human figure made a spectacular return in visual art and literature in the 1920s. Following modernism's withdrawal, nonobjective painting gave way to realistic depictions of the body and experimental literary techniques were abandoned for novels with powerfully individuated characters. But the celebrated return of the human in the interwar years was not as straightforward as it may seem. In Realism after Modernism, Devin Fore challenges the widely accepted view that this period represented a return to traditional realist representation and its humanist postulates. Interwar realism, he argues, did not reinstate its nineteenth-century predecessor but invoked realism as a strategy of mimicry that anticipates postmodernist pastiche.Through close readings of a series of works by German artists and writers of the period, Fore investigates five artistic devices that