Comparing realism to a zombie that just won’t die, Carolyn Lesjak positions her new book, The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons (Stanford UP 2021), within the numerous attempts to keep it alive. Unlike others who revisit realism for its representational “complexities,” Lesjak asks how revisiting this seemingly undead mode of representation can illuminate our current moment, and so she proposes a “rereading [of] realism with a more overtly political aim in mind: to consider how realist novels help us think about our own present and future with the tools realism offers to hand.”1 This issue of Mediations follows Lesjak’s lead and subsequently asks how cultural works, especially the realist novel, attempt to represent what Corbin Hiday and Anna Kornbluh describe in their contribution as the “unrepresentable totality of social relations imposed by capital,” as well as how we, as cultural critics, understand these attempts. The two opening essays offer different but complementary ways of approaching these questions, with the first taking a more theoretical approach and the second providing close readings of two novels. The issue then takes a deep dive into Lesjak’s new book through a forum edited by Hiday and Kornbluh.

We begin, then, with Racheal Fest’s “Culture and Neoliberalism: Raymond Williams, Friedrich Hayek, and the New Legacy of the Cultural Turn,” which juxtaposes the work of conservative economist Friedrich Hayek and socialist cultural critic Raymond Williams in order to reevaluate how humanities scholars engage with the question of culture. She especially urges us to “foreground our differences from other fields and address ourselves to antagonistic extra-disciplinary formations.” Her engagement with economic primary sources here serves as a model of the type of criticism for which she advocates.

The second essay, Devin William Daniels’ “Kill the Body and the Head Will Die: Realism, Capitalism, and the Financier,” examines a common background character of realist fiction, the financier, and how this character “mirrors the unseen movements of capital.” To do so, he reads Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in conjunction with Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 to show how nineteenth-century realism and twenty-first-century realism complement and complicate one another.

The second part of this issue, the forum on Lesjak’s recent book, is introduced by Hiday and Kornbluh in their essay, “Reading Realism Dialectically: A Forum on Carolyn Lesjak’s The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons.”Theyprovide an overview of the force of Lesjak’s argument to set the stage for the following nine reflections on the book. In particular, they highlight her use of dialectical reading and how this form of criticism allows her to offer a “dissent on realism,” as well as underscore how literature of the past can illuminate the issues of the present.

The forum begins with Paul Stasi’s “The One asThe Many,” which examines one of Lesjak’s key terms, the “common,” through her focus on “type” as opposed to individualized characters, as the former relies on the existence of others in order to make sense—as Lesjak notes, a type has “no meaning in isolation.” These types, then, are both common figures and represent a sort of commons themselves. Stasi argues that, by focusing on types, Lesjak undercuts the traditional narrative that the centerpiece of the novel form is the liberal individual.

Moving from one iteration of the “common,” we turn to Lesjak’s other key term: enclosure. In “Reading Enclosure and the Global Commons with Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin(2013),” Amy R. Wong expands the implications of Lesjak’s arguments about British realism to contemporary China. Wong argues that Jia Zhangke’s film A Touch of Sin asks us to think “with as well as against more optimistic possibilities for global solidarity against enclosure’s capitalist logic.”

Zach Fruit highlights the “contradictory dialectic” at work in Lesjak’s reading of realism in his contribution, “Realism as Walmart.” Realism, he notes, “was a mechanism for capitalist ideology” while also, according to Lesjak, “sustaining and reinventing collective life.” This dialectic, then, could, following Jameson’s controversial conception of the utopian potential of Walmart, highlight realism’s own utopian potential.

Continuing with the question of Lesjak’s employment of dialectical reading, “Figural Reading, or, a ‘Weak Messianic’ Undercurrent in Literary Criticism” by Thomas A. Laughlin argues that her dialectical reading is in fact closer to an Auerbachian “figural reading”: in which “something real and historical…announces something else real and historical.” Through this reimagined framing, Laughlin questions some of Lesjak’s readings of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy.

Emily Steinlight’s “Realism’s Unenclosed Spots of Commonness” focuses on what she sees as Lesjak’s most meaningful contribution: her ability to link realism’s “valorization of what is ‘common’... to the commons,” which “reactivates the promise of collective life in the present.” She does caution, however, against too strong an emphasis on “type,” which could become essentialized rather quickly and thereby create more distance than unity.

In “Figure / Ground,” Ronjaunee Chatterjee examines Lesjak’s focus on “the language of figuration," which underscores the difference between a realism that prioritizes the visible and one that prioritizes an “underlying or unseen reality.” Through this focus, according to Chatterjee, Lesjak is able to “uncover a history of enclosures of the commons that is riddled with figurative trouble.” One such “trouble” is the legacy and reality of racial capitalism, which Chatterjee argues, must be taken into account even if the result is “incommensurate & potentially unsettling.”

Nancy Armstrong’s essay, “Fagin’s Last Words,” teases out how Charles Dickens’s “character systems” are linked to the older types of character books, as Lesjak claims, by arguing, “the relation to the older vocabulary of types only increases in value... if we also understand that it is a principle of rupture that gives meaning to characters once the old social taxonomy is gone.” Armstrong is especially interested in the character of Fagin in Oliver Twist and how his development in the novel underscores Lesjak’s explanation of how “the commons” is transformed into “the common” in nineteenth-century realism.

In “Get It Together,” Rithika Ramamurthy homes in on the contemporary political implications of Lesjak’s study of nineteenth-century realism, and in particular how she attempts to bridge the “yawning chasm between idealizations of collective being and the materialization of political collectivity.” Ramamurthy is especially interested in how we can mobilize such bridges in terms of collective action within higher education.

The forum concludes with “Sameness” by Bruce Robbins, who, similarly to Chatterjee, seeks to illuminate further the role of racial capitalism in the history Lesjak mobilizes in her readings of Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy, as well as her calls for present collectivity through the commons. He especially stresses the need to see beyond “difference” — often formulated in terms of identity — to be able to unite in collective action, to “feel that coalitional energy as our own.”

The issue ends with “Surrogacy, Value, and Social Reproduction: A Review of Full Surrogacy Now,”in which Natalie Suzelis reviews Sophie Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso 2019).Suzelis outlines Lewis’s call for the abolishment of the private family as well as for “full surrogacy,” a ‘ ‘gestational commons,” in which babies “belong” to no one person or family but are instead a communal responsibility, thus eliminating the profits currently associated with commercial surrogacy.

—Melissa Macero, for the Mediations editors

1. Carolyn Lesjak, The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021), 2.