Reading the Real

The study examines two twenty-first century novels and films from a Lacanian perspective to argue that the interest these works have taken in what Lacan termed the 'Real' suggests a new path for the novel and film after the era of poststructuralist postmodernism. For Lacan, the Real refers explicitly not to reality but to something that resists all symbolization and that due to its inaccessibility possesses a traumatic character. Moments of trauma as 'intrusions of the Real', but also modes of potentiality, of excessive enjoyment, which Lacan called jouissance, and of posthumousness, paradoxically, allow us to spot this Real in our everyday reality and in a given fictional work, as contemporary Lacanian scholars such as Slavoj Zizek and Todd McGowan have detailed. Based on such new approaches to Lacan, the study argues that the focus the works under examination put on various representations of the Real indicates a shift of perspective in contemporary fiction and film away from the selfreflexive text-centeredness of postmodern art and toward a new interest in ethical questions and the (material) conditions of reality in the twenty-first century. In this light, the study attests to Lacanian theory an ongoing relevance for contemporary literary and film criticism.