Shaw's Abstract Clarity

Extract

Those of you who have taken any courses here in English literature—and I believe a number of you have—have surely at one time or another used, and therefore abused, that difficult word, Realism. For we all abuse it, whether we naively rub it, as Aladdin rubbed his lamp, hoping thereby to produce the jinni of Ernest Hemingway, or like grand metaphysicians toy with it by conjuring up the likes of Plato, Berkeley and Dr. Johnson. It seems to be a word made to be abused, and sometimes I think we would be better off if we did not regard it as a word at all but as a lower form of utterance, a noise perhaps, like a pig's grunt or a dog's bark, that we just have to give off with on certain literary occasions.