Talk:Hysterical realism

message: After the publication of an article by Time in 2012 asking "whatever happened to Hysterical Realism?"  http://entertainment.time.com/2012/07/11/what-ever-happened-to-hysterical-realism/ I wonder if scholars of literature might be inclined to return and define this strange and wonderful term. I've certainly enjoyed my dalliance into this talk page. Worrypower (talk) 21:38, 25 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Literature Theory 

message: This article is a mess. In the sentence  He decried the genre as an attempt to "turn fiction into social theory," and an attempt to tell us "how the world works rather than how somebody felt about something." the first quotation is not from the essay (who knows where it's from) and the second half from a comment by Zadie Smith about what she thinks novelists should be or are trying to achieve. 160.79.209.253 (talk) 21:44, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: No, apparently I'm just hopelessly old-fashioned and out of the Literary Loop... --Wetman 06:53, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: untitled

message: The paragraph that begins, "Candidates for inclusion in the genre include..." seems a bit unnecessary to me, or at least up for discussion. For example, Tom Wolfe seems a bit out of place alongside Don DeLillo; I wouldn't classify them in the same category. I would put Tom Wolfe under the rubric of the New Journalism, and DeLillo & Pynchon would go under the category DeLillo & Pynchon. This listing seems to be a laundry list of someone's favorite authors. And as I write this, it occurs to me that an ecyclopedia might not be the proper place for cataloging literary terms, the ins and outs of which are a bit dicier than, say, invertebrate taxonomy. Buckshot 19:10, July 22, 2005 (UTC)
From how the article defines Hysterical realism, I'd be inclined to include Kurt Vonnegut into the list.
What about the other postmodern "monsters" like William Gaddis or John Barth? What about Lawrence Norfolk? He is often compared to Rushdie & Pynchon. What about the Illuminatus! trilogy? And Delany's Dhalgren? Tom Robbins? I'm not too sure, but with this definition, all big pomo novels would fit in. (When I say "big", I mean like the mentioned ones.) --82.131.143.195 07:14, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Ian, that's a good question; I vaguely recall having a discussion about it years ago. Here's how I think about it: if "postmodernism" has a general set of widely accepted characteristics, Tristram Shandy meets many of them, despite being written far before modernism or postmodernism. In that sense, it is postmodern. I could certainly see calling it a precursor of postmodernism as well; "precursor" implies that it had a significant influence on postmodernism. So for me, at least, the nuance is in how much Sterne influenced postmodernists, and that's not something I'm qualified to answer. -Phoenixrod (talk) 17:37, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  List of Authors 

message: it seems to me that here is a doctoral thesis waiting to happen. Manic, frenzied, madding, whatever. Tom Wolfe? Yes. Don DeLillo, he who rocked my soul to the bosom of Somnus many an insomniac night? No. Buckshot 20:45, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  I know, and 

message: * This evening has been the first time i have come across this term. From what i have read, it seems to me that the works of Douglas Adams fit the description (imposing length, manic offbeat characters, frenzied and multi-simultaneous action, forays into philosophy, mathematics, metaphysics, sociology etc). Am i wildly off the mark, it strikes me i could well be, because Adams doesnt have much in common (to me) with any of the other authors mentioned here? If i am right, does he warrant inclusion? surely, he is prominent enough. If i am not right, could the definition and description be cleaned up so no-one else would make that mistake? After all, this is supposed to be an encyclopaedia-standard article about the topic.. Jdcooper 18:09, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Interesting question. Novels described as Maximalist, which appears to be synonymous with Hysterical Realism, are characterized as long, but Adams' works, at least the Hitchhiker's series, are not long - usually about 300 pages or so. If you're referring to The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that is a compilation of 5 novels. Did you mean Douglas Hofstadter instead? Douglas Adams does have manic offbeat characters, etc.  I think that's because Adams foresaw where we were heading, and I think, tried to warn us about it. Many of those cited as Maximalists, or Hysterical Realists, are reflecting the world around them, which is very complex and nuanced and not susceptible to easy answers. Ileanadu (talk) 14:26, 3 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clarifying for a newbie 

message: I'm sorry, but what is "chronic length?" - Zepheus 21:59, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It is when something is long, and then one waits a while, and the thing is still found to be lengthy. Obviously. —vivacissamamente 06:47, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  chronic 

message: The first two paragraphs seem to be saying the exact same thing in almost the same words:
:Hysterical realism, also called recherché postmodernism, is a term coined in 2000 by the English critic James Wood in an essay on Zadie Smith's White Teeth to describe what he sees as a literary genre typified by a strong contrast between elaborately absurd prose, plotting, or characterization and careful, detailed investigations of real specific social phenomena.
:Wood introduced the term in an essay on Zadie Smith's White Teeth, which appeared in the July 24, 2000 issue of The New Republic[1] Wood uses the term to denote the contemporary conception of the "big, ambitious novel" that pursues "vitality at all costs" and consequently "knows a thousand things but does not know a single human being."
The definition provided is also not clear. Is the literary genre "typified by a strong contrast" or is the literary genre (Hysterical realism) characterized by "elaborately absurd prose, plotting, or characterization" that Wood contrasts with another more careful genre? As Wood uses it, it seems to be a derogatory term, yet Zadie Smith doesn't seem to take offense at her work being characterized in this way.
Since I got to this article from Maximalism, what is the difference? Is Hysterical realism just what critics of Maximalism call it? Ileanadu (talk) 14:11, 3 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Intro - Repetition & other issues