Effect of Reality

The effect of reality is a textual device identified by Roland Barthes the purpose of which was to establish literary texts as realistic. Barthes first suggested this concept in his 1968 essay "The Reality Effect," in which he argues that untheorized descriptive "residues" of the text produce effects of reality through their dissembling of the tripartite sign--in the absence of any signified, Barthes argues, the textual signifiers for "real" objects had for their actual signifieds only the concept of realism itself; further, Barthes suggested that the origins of this textual device came through the development of an "aesthetic finality of language" present in the use of the rhetorical device of ecphrasis in "Alexandrian neo-rhetoric of the second century" (The Reality Effect in Barthes 1989).

Barthes also showed that this effect of reality was a key problem of historical analysis and writing in that historical writing proclaimed an unproblematic realism that was in fact just this textual device in action (The Discourse of History in Barthes 1989 - online version The Discourse of History). It was this aspect of the effect of reality that Ankersmit showed helped to explain both the evolution of historical enquiry and the problematic textual nature of history (Ankersmit 1989).

The concern with realism and the constructed nature of historical and literary facts that both Barthes and Ankersmit expressed is also to be found in the field of Discursive psychology; and Jonathan Potter has analysed similar problems and issues in his Representing Reality (Potter 1996).

Famous quotes containing the words effect of, effect and/or reality:

    The effect of a good government is to make life more valuable; of a bad one, to make it less valuable.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Nothing could his enemies do but it rebounded to his infinite advantage,—that is, to the advantage of his cause.... No theatrical manager could have arranged things so wisely to give effect to his behavior and words. And who, think you, was the manager? Who placed the slave-woman and her child, whom he stooped to kiss for a symbol, between his prison and the gallows?
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Do you call it doubting to write down on a piece of paper that you doubt? If so, doubt has nothing to do with any serious business. But do not make believe; if pedantry has not eaten all the reality out of you, recognize, as you must, that there is much that you do not doubt, in the least. Now that which you do not at all doubt, you must and do regard as infallible, absolute truth.
    Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)