Introductory Remarks

I want to reiterate Paula's welcome to those of you joining us today at the Realism in the World conference. The inspiration for this conference was a panel held by the Junior Scholars's Caucus of the Future of Minority Studies, last June at Cornell University. In the course of that panel, we began to rethink realist theory from outside the academy. In my introductory comments to that panel, I emphasized the need for us to remain aware of the fact that real-life situations often pose solutions to theoretical conundra that many times seem irresolvable solely on the level of ideas. That continues to be the impulse that drives many of these papers today. Implicit in such an exercise is the assumption that individual events, episodes or texts do not merely stand on their own, but refer to larger structures that shape society as a whole. Although this might sound obvious to many, literary criticism in particular has had an ambivalent relationship to that very assumption. Other disciplines take this fact for granted; in order for a sociologist or an anthropologist to justify studying society at all, a relationship must be assumed, even if not explicitly theorized, between the event and the structure. Having put it in crude, Levi-Straussian terms perhaps overstates the case; however, the fear of mechanical accounts of the world such as those provided by structuralism has led many cultural critics to eschew comprehensive accounts altogether. As Barbara Epstein has written in another context, the ensuing political paralysis has led, among other things, to the relegation of the humanities to complete irrelevance. If texts cannot be part of a scholarly engagement with society's 'big questions,' then why study them in the first place?

The attempt that we begin here, then, is a rigorous theoretization of the relationship of literature to the world- as it exists in the daily lives of people, and as it is conceptualized in the academy. Although the papers themselves do not necessarily state the question in these terms, I urge you to remind yourselves of the stakes of this project even as you listen today to the details of the working classroom, Okinawan identity, Black nationalism and all the other fascinating topics that will be discussed. And, equally importantly, I urge you to let your conclusions be open to the developments unfolding outside the conference room. Even while we sit here, theory is being made in the world.