Realism Lives On: On Roger Garaudy’s D’un Réalisme Sans Rivages

Abstract

The article discusses the largely forgotten concept of realism developed by the French Marxist philosopher Roger Garaudy in his book D’un Réalisme Sans Rivages [Realism without borders].

In the first part of the article, I discuss the context in which the book was discussed when it was first published in Poland in 1967. I compare and contrast Garaudy’s observations with Polish critics, who, at the time, were also actively and passionately discussing the question of realism. Specifically, I refer to Julian Kornhauser and Adam Zagajewski’s Świat nie przedstawiony [The unrepresented world] and Janusz Sławiński’s Rzut oka na ewolucję poezji polskiej w latach 1956-1980 [The evolution of Polish poetry from 1956 to 1980].

In the second part of the article, I analyse the selected fragments from Garaudy’s book, demonstrating that D’un Réalisme Sans Rivages may inform contemporary literary criticism and theory. I try to answer the question whether and how the tools proposed by the French thinker may be useful in describing contemporary literary phenomena and how his ideas can be used to formulate a new, not necessarily Marxist, concept of realism.