Realist details persuade via metonymy and a borrowed air of observational fidelity.
Evidence
Matthew Potolsky offers an insight into this process that has much to tell us about how Muslim misery memoirs gain the assent of their Western audience: “Details in realist works highlight the artist’s observational fidelity.… Yet the realist detail is also a highly conventional stylistic technique. Jakobson, for example, argues that realist details are based on … metonymy. Unlike metaphor, which compares dissimilar things, metonymy substitutes one thing for something associated or close to it.… Realist metonymies create an entire world by way of such associations: one or two details imply the possibility of infinite details ‘outside’ the scene that might have been described.” Realist details in Muslim misery memoirs rely on such associations, but they are always deeply imbued with a particular kind of exoticism. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 241
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Defines realist detail as metonymic — substituting associated items for a world — which is the mechanism underpinning misery-memoir verisimilitude.
- XREF: Directly transferable to reading Hamid and Naqvi: asks whether their realist details also trade on metonymic exoticism or resist it.
- SEED: Could frame the central essay hinge: ‘exotic metonymy’ as the tool distinguishing novels that contest versus reinforce Islamophobia.