The Returns of Realism: Avant-Garde Documentary and the Reconstruction of Verisimilitude

While at the Academy, Fore was completing work on two books that emerged from dissertation research conducted in the archives of Berlin and Moscow. The first, “Realism’s Revenants,” examines New Objectivity and related forms of mimetic realism in German literature and art during the interwar period; the other, “All the Graphs,” is a critical analysis of Soviet factography that focuses on the work of the operative writer Sergei Tret’iakov. Fore’s investigations into the last manifestations of the German and Soviet avant-garde overturn reigning scholarly narratives about the displacement of experimental avant-garde practices by modes of realist verisimilitude taken from the nineteenth century. His inquiry into the conventions of verisimilitude and figuration during the interwar years suggests a quite different story: that the seemingly “revenant” realism of the 1920s was unlike its predecessor from the previous century and in fact disclosed an entirely new way of conceiving the relationship between modernist abstraction and mimetic figuration. From theatrical biomechanics to painterly perspective and literary documentary, the artistic formations that emerged at the end of modernism ultimately constitute an alternate pre-history of the post-modern.