The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

244 Travesty
Translator’, in Illuminations; S. Bassnett,
Translation Studies (1980); R. W. Brislin
(ed.), Translation: Approaches and
Research (1976); G. Toury, In Search of
a Theory of Translation (1980); George
Steiner, After Babel (1998).
Travesty See PARODY.
GMH
Typicality Although types and
typologies have long been traditional
ideas in literary criticism, MARXIST
CRITICISM deployed this notion in new
ways. The Hungarian Marxist critic
Georg Lukács, heavily influenced by the
aesthetics of the German philosopher
Hegel, used the idea of ‘typicality’ to
indicate the process whereby, in classical
REALIST literature, events and individuals
are at once uniquely particularized, and
representative of broader, deeper trends in
history itself. A George Eliot character,
for example, is neither an isolated
‘personality’ nor a mere emblem of some
underlying reality; the peculiar complexity
of such a character lies in its dialectical
unity of the individual and the
representative. For Lukács, such a fusion
avoids at once an ‘alienated’ presentation
of character which divorces it from its
social context, and a pure reduction of
individuals or situations to abstract
‘symptoms’ of impersonal forces. Lukács
finds MODERNIST literature characterized
by both forms of representation, and
dogmatically regards them as absolute
errors. Characters in such fictions are
either damagingly ‘privatized’, reduced to
mere abstract consciousness, or allegorically
presented. But the latter defect is
also, for Lukács, typical of the ‘socialist
realist’ literature to which he was privately
hostile: socialist realism in this
sense perpetuates the weaknesses of ‘naturalism’,
which represents a declension
from the major realist tradition. Scott and
Baizac, writing at a period when the
bourgeoisie was still a progressive force,
were able to create ‘typical’ events and
characters, sensing the shaping forces of
history within particular phenomena. By
the time of Flaubert, Zola and Conrad, the
bourgeoisie had endured a crisis of political
confidence, could no longer make living
connections between individuals and
their world and found itself confronted by
an opaque, impenetrable reality. It took
refuge either in dispassionate description
of this supposedly immutable society
(Flaubert, NATURALISM), or in the private
recesses of consciousness (SYMBOLISM).
In the work of such exceptional writers as
Thomas Mann, Lukács found the great
tradition of typicality perpetuated into the
twentieth century.
See J. Bernstein, The Philosophy of
the Novel (1984); G. Lukács, The
Historical Novel (1962), Studies in
European Realism (1950); R. Williams,
Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (1968).
TE