hard · GRE Verbal

Passage: In defending the realist novel against modernist critics who dismissed it as naive transcription, some theorists have overcorrected. They insist that realism is nothing but convention—a set of arbitrary signals a culture agrees to read as 'lifelike'—and that its claim to represent the world is therefore an illusion of the same order as any other genre's. This position has the merit of puncturing realism's pretensions, but it purchases that satisfaction too cheaply. If every mode of representation is equally conventional, the argument loses its power to distinguish among conventions, and cannot explain why some conventions strike successive generations as more faithful to experience than others. The author suggests that the theorists' position is flawed chiefly because it:

1. Undermines the very discrimination the theorists would need to make their point persuasive
2. Denies that the realist novel employs any of the conventional signals other genres rely on
3. Concedes the modernist charge that the realist novel is merely naive transcription
4. Overlooks that realism had once claimed to represent the actual world faithfully
5. Proves that realist conventions are, in successive generations, more faithful than modernist ones

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