6 - Conclusion: The Way We Write Now—A Case for Realism(s)

Summary

Discussion of the new realism is meant to contribute to an understanding of the plurality of choices in which we currently live.

—Winfried Fluck, “Surface Knowledge and Deep Knowledge”

At the alleged end of the photographic age—spurred on by the specter of the digital—we have come full circle to fundamental questions about the nature and cultures of analog photography: its (photo)realism, its rhetoric, its claims and disclaimers. In a digital environment, the analog calls attention to itself. For its apparent datedness as a “residual” discourse—lagging behind the latest fashions and technologies—the analog seems to have reemerged as a hot topic, paradoxically, by way of its nontopicality. The a-chronological persistence of the analog model—which continues, as has been argued in this study, as an authoritative reference point of photographic discourses and of what constitutes the photographic—becomes especially apparent in the context of artistic production, such as the field of contemporary literature. Certainly, one might ask why novelists in the twenty-first century (still) conjure the motif of photography in their writing? Why and how has the photographic, as established by 170 years of thinking and arguing about analog photography, survived into the literary production of the new millennium? In which ways, and to what purposes, does contemporary writing refer to, discuss, and problematize the issue of photography by negotiating analog and digital models and remediating the one through the other?