Abstract

Critics of Realism such as Foucault assert that "reality" has no existence until prefigured by acts of the literary imagination, and that the literature of Realism falsely and ideologically creates the impression that it is continuous with life itself. For Foucault, discursive practices are the only possible objects of historical inquiry since human activity can never be understood apart from the ways in which it is articulated. He mostly investigates order, the codes of order, reflections upon order, and the experience of order. The fetishization of order, the substitution of the order of words for the disorder of events, is postmodernism as ideology. Realism does not provide a definition of reality at all -rather a description of the world which does not impose order on chaos. Instead it reveals disorder amidst apparent order. No knowledge of language or discursive practices can disclose the particular experiences which shape our sense of reality