Abstract
This article proposes Interrupted Realism as a new literary/artistic mode that formalizes how we experience reality under digital conditions: as a three-dimensional, embodied timeline continually intersected by a second, screen-based timeline. Whereas Brechtian alienation and postmodern fragmentation were historically deliberate strategies for preventing immersive identification, Interrupted Realism is ontological: it reflects a world in which interruption is the normal form of life. The phone buzz, the notification ping, the serial feed, the oscillation between tabs—these no longer interrupt a prior, stable continuity; they constitute experience. Drawing on Brecht, Benjamin, McLuhan, Lyotard, Jameson, Baudrillard, Manovich, Hayles, Crary, Chun, and others, the article situates Interrupted Realism within a genealogy of estrangement while arguing for its distinctiveness in the age of networked platforms and algorithmic attention. After surveying key precedents in literature (Wallace, Danielewski, Egan) and cinema (Godard, Haneke, Kiarostami, screenlife films), the article presents an extended case study of Cem Akaş’s The Meaning of Words (Sözcüklerin Anlamı, 2025), a novel that continuously splices realist scenes with aphorisms, pseudo-academic mini-essays, social-media-like shards, and lyric fragments. The novel’s form enacts the “coitus interruptus that never ends”—a perpetual interference pattern between embodied and virtual timelines—thereby offering a prime instance of Interrupted Realism’s cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical stakes. The conclusion sketches implications for narrative theory, media philosophy, and the future of realist representation.
Keywords: Interrupted Realism; estrangement; postmodernism; digital media; attention; Cem Akaş; Turkish fiction.
Introduction: From Immersion to Interference
Realism’s canonical promise—Balzac’s social totality, Flaubert’s minute observation, Eliot’s moral psychology—rested on immersion: the feeling of entering a continuous world. Modernist and postmodern interventions reworked that promise via fragmentation, montage, self-reference, and irony; but crucially, those were aesthetic choices. Today, immersion itself is historically obsolete as a baseline, not because authors decide to disrupt it but because lived life is already disrupted. We inhabit two concurrent temporalities: (1) an embodied, spatially situated timeline and (2) a screen timeline composed of push alerts, feeds, clips, and chats. Our perceptual field is an interference pattern between these timelines.
I define Interrupted Realism as the set of literary and artistic forms that represent this interference pattern by integrating interruption into the ontology of the work. It is “realist” not by returning to nineteenth-century mimesis, but by being faithful to the texture of contemporary experience. The metaphor of “coitus interruptus that never ends” captures the affective register: desire for flow meets the structural certainty of breakage; continuity is approached, punctured, resumed, and punctured again—without closure.
The article proceeds as follows. First, I reconstruct a theoretical lineage (Brecht → modernism → postmodernism → media theory) to clarify both debts and distances. Second, I describe the screen as a temporal infrastructure rather than an external device. Third, I develop a typology of Interrupted Realism through world examples in literature and cinema. Fourth, I present Akaş’s The Meaning of Words as a sustained case of the mode in contemporary Turkish fiction, drawing on the full manuscript. Finally, I derive methodological and ethical implications for narrative studies and media theory.
Literature Review: Estrangement, Fragmentation, Interruption
Brecht and the Politics of Making-Strange
Brecht codifies interruption as pedagogy. His Verfremdungseffekt stages a visible apparatus: direct address, song, projected titles, exposed lights—devices that break trance and force cognition. As he puts it, theatre should make the familiar “appear unfamiliar,” prompting analysis rather than empathy.¹ In a well-known contrast, Brecht opposes the passive recognition of dramatic theatre to the active examination of epic theatre: the latter generates the spectator who says, “I’d never have thought of it… It’s got to stop.”²
Interrupted Realism clearly inherits Brecht’s emphasis on cognitive activation, but the causality inverts. Brecht imposes interruption to counter immersive illusion; Interrupted Realism registers life that is already non-immersive. The didactic labor once done by epic technique is now outsourced to everyday media environments.
Modernist Fragmentation: Shock and Synthesis
Modernism’s principle of discontinuity—Eliot’s collage of voices (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”),³ Joyce’s stylistic heteroglossia, Woolf’s oscillating interiorities—was a response to war, urbanity, and technological acceleration. Yet even in its fragmentariness, modernism often sought higher synthesis: formal unity (Joyce), spiritual pattern (Eliot), or phenomenological depth (Woolf). Interrupted Realism differs: synthesis doesn’t arrive; the break is the form of life.
Postmodern Metafiction and the End of Metanarratives
Postmodernism radicalized interruption into self-reflexivity. Barth’s thesis of “exhaustion” announced a literature that survives by cannibalizing forms.⁴ Pynchon’s paranoid dispersions and DeLillo’s media-saturated prose dismantle stable referents. Lyotard succinctly characterizes the epistemic atmosphere as “incredulity toward metanarratives.”⁵ For Baudrillard, simulation substitutes signs for the real—no longer imitation but “substituting the signs of the real for the real.”⁶
Again, Interrupted Realism is adjacent yet distinct. Postmodernism chooses play, pastiche, metafiction. Interrupted Realism does not celebrate arbitrariness; it documents attention—routinely split, constantly re-contextualized by platforms that are neither playful nor neutral.
Media Theory: From Montage to Platforms
Benjamin anticipates distracted spectatorship. Film trains “the absent-minded examiner”; the “shock” of montage tutors a new sensorium.⁷ McLuhan’s axiom—“the medium is the message”—reframes media as environments whose form (not content) shapes perception.⁸ Lev Manovich shows how new media are modular, variable, and database-driven; they privilege selection and recombination over linear sequence.⁹ Hayles contrasts “hyperattention” (rapid task-switching, multiple streams) with “deep attention,” and argues that institutions must recognize a new cognitive ecology rather than lament decline.¹⁰ Crary diagnoses 24/7 capitalism as the elimination of off-time—a “prison without walls.”¹¹ Chun details how habitual updating becomes a temporal logic: to “remain the same,” platforms must constantly renew, keeping users in continuous partial presence.¹²
Interrupted Realism synthesizes these insights: if platforms organize attention as perpetual potential interruption, then the “realist” artwork that remains faithful to life must formalize interruption not as ornament, but as structure.
A Brief Critical History of “Interrupted Realism”: Overview of Uses across Literary and Art Discourse
A scan of the scholarly and para-scholarly record suggests that “interrupted realism” is not (yet) a stabilized theoretical term so much as a descriptor that different communities deploy to name moments when realist representation is periodically suspended, broken, or overlaid by another regime of signification. The phrase appears most coherently in film studies, sporadically in literary criticism, and more freely in contemporary painting discourse, where it often overlaps with adjacent labels (e.g., “disrupted realism”). What follows reviews these uses, notes their proximities to better-established frameworks (Brecht’s theory of interruption; modernist “aesthetics of interruption”), and proposes a working map of meanings.
1) Film and media studies: from montage to “heightened, interrupted realism”
One of the clearest critical uses comes from cinephile scholarship on Dušan Makavejev, where Benjamin Halligan, reviewing Raymond Durgnat’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism for Senses of Cinema, describes Makavejev’s collage of documentary and fiction as “a heightened, interrupted realism”—an aesthetic in which realism is punctured by heterogeneous inserts (propaganda reels, didactic sequences, sex-education film) yet remains the ground the film revisits.¹
More systematically, Alexandra Watson’s (Univ. of Cape Town) doctoral thesis on “deviant realisms” identifies a family of works that “share an interrupted realism brought on by a deviation from the norms of continuity editing.” In other words, realist diegesis is periodically broken at the level of editing grammar (ellipses, discontinuities, insertions), generating a hybrid mode that alternates immersion and disruption.² Her introduction explicitly glosses such interruptions as both formal (editing departures) and perceptual (viewer experience of the break), situating them alongside Buñuel’s later films and Neil Jordan’s work.²
Across these film-critical uses, “interrupted realism” names a realist substrate that is repeatedly broken by counter-modes (documentary collage, essayistic exposition, reflexive inserts), often with political or epistemic stakes: the breaks expose the constructedness of “the real” while keeping its legibility in play. This cluster resonates with Brechtian montage and with modernist strategies of estrangement through interruption (see §3).¹²
2) Literary criticism: scattered usage against a stronger conceptual backdrop
Within literary studies, the exact phrase “interrupted realism” appears only sporadically. A Cambridge review of Nicholas Robinette’s Realism, Form, and the Postcolonial Novel lists “experimental realism, interrupted realism, or epistemological realism” among terms invoked in the book, while gently chiding the lack of contextualization—an indication that the label is used heuristically rather than as a codified school.³ (The review’s very framing—“occurs without enough contextualization”—suggests the term’s non-canonical status.)
By contrast, theoretical groundwork for interruption in/against realism is robust, even if it uses other nomenclature. Most prominently, Ástráður Eysteinsson’s long chapter “Realism, Modernism, and the Aesthetics of Interruption” tracks how modernist writing interrupts realist transparency via shocks, cuts, and formal discontinuities, giving the interruption a conceptual—not merely descriptive—role in literary history.⁴ Eysteinsson offers the richest frame for treating “interrupted realism” as more than a casual tag: interruption is theorized as a procedure that reorganizes narrative attention and reader response.⁴
Taken together, the literary record suggests that “interrupted realism” functions primarily as a handy, non-standard gloss for realist texts that periodically insert essayistic, documentary, metafictional, or lyrical breaks. Its conceptual legitimacy in literary theory comes less from the phrase’s frequency and more from its proximity to well-articulated accounts of interruption as a modernist (and postmodern) operation.³⁴
3) Precedent and neighbors: Brecht and the codification of interruption
If any tradition normalizes interruption as a named technique, it is Brecht’s epic theatre. Brecht’s practice and theory privilege “interruptions”—freezes, captions, songs, re-framings—as means of preventing immersive identification and activating critical spectatorship (the Verfremdungseffekt).⁵⁶ Britannica’s overview is blunt: epic theatre “often interrupt[s] the story line to address the audience directly.”⁷ Walter Benjamin’s Understanding Brecht likewise stresses the retarding function of interruptions that frame actions episodically.⁶ These sources don’t say “interrupted realism,” but they precisely codify interruption as a formal and political strategy that acts upon realism (and upon naturalist theatre) from within the performance.⁵⁶⁷
This Brechtian archive explains why later critics easily reach for a phrase like “interrupted realism” when they see realist surfaces periodically broken by captions, documentary inserts, didactic exposition, or montage: the device is classical, even if the phrase is new.
4) Contemporary art discourse: painterly self-description and movement-adjacent usage
In painting, “interrupted realism” circulates most freely—often in artist statements and exhibition reviews rather than academic art history. For example, painter Ariane Luckey describes her scraping and simplification as leaving “what remains” to “provide a personal interrupted realism,” a way of allowing blur, abrasion, and incompletion to interrupt representational build-up.⁸ A New American Paintings review of Jered Sprecher similarly praises “Memory Device’s interrupted realism,” using the phrase to name a compositional oscillation between indexical detail and pattern/abstraction.⁹ The Illustration Art blog even notes critics’ coinages—“discombobulation,” “Kanevskyfication,” and “interrupted realism”—for a trend in which figurative depiction coexists with surface marks that deny pictorial illusion in the same canvas.¹⁰
This looser ecosystem also explains a recurrent conflation with “disrupted realism,” which has coalesced into a curatorial/publishing category (John Seed’s Disrupted Realism: Paintings for a Distracted World surveys 38 painters whose figuration is altered by memory/technology effects).¹¹ While the two labels overlap descriptively, “disrupted” tends to brand a contemporary movement, whereas “interrupted” names the rhythm of perception and making (stop-start, conceal-reveal) rather than a proper noun for a school.¹¹
5) Early and miscellaneous sightings
The phrase pops up occasionally in theatre journalism—e.g., a 1965 BG News review titled “Interrupted Realism” of a campus production of Blood Wedding—but such occurrences read like headline rhetoric, not terminological proposals. (They’re useful as etymological curiosities rather than theoretical anchors.)
6) A working map of meanings
Across these domains, the family resemblance is clear:
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Cinematic usage (strongest): a realist baseline broken by counter-modes (documentary, propaganda insert, instructional passage, fantasy) or by editing deviations from continuity; the effect toggles immersion and critique (Makavejev; Buñuel/Jordan in Watson).¹²
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Literary usage (scattered): a tag for hybridity or reflexivity within otherwise realist fiction; theoretically supported by the modernist “aesthetics of interruption,” rather than by a canonized category called “interrupted realism.”³⁴
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Painterly usage (popular): a studio-critical phrase for partial resolution—figures coexisting with scumbles, erasures, or graphic overlays that interrupt illusion without abandoning it (Luckey; Sprecher; Kanevsky-adjacent practices).⁸⁹¹⁰
What differs is the level at which interruption operates: editing/temporal in film; narrative/essayistic in literature; painterly/surface in art. What unifies the uses is that realism is not discarded; it is periodically arrested, reframed, or collided with another code—a stance with deep Brechtian precedent.⁵⁶⁷
7) Assessment for theory-building
On balance, “interrupted realism” is an available concept-phrase whose referents are legible across media, but it lacks a canonical definition. Film studies offers the most articulate uses, while literary studies have strong adjacent theory (Eysteinsson; Brecht/Benjamin) but little standardized terminology under this exact label. In art criticism, the term is productive descriptively but also porous, drifting toward “disrupted realism.”¹¹
For anyone wishing to stabilize the term (e.g., in a theory of contemporary, screen-saturated perception), the historical resources are there: Brecht’s codified interruptions (captions, songs, freezes) and modernist interruption as a literary procedure (Eysteinsson) can ground a rigorous definition that encompasses temporal, discursive, and surface breaks while preserving a realist horizon.⁴⁵⁶⁷
The Screen as Ontology (Not a Device)
The smartphone is not merely a rectangle in a pocket. It is a temporal operator that turns embodied time into a field of interruptible intervals. The mere possibility of a notification modifies the phenomenology of the present: it installs a parallel, poised timeline. The result is a bi-temporal consciousness:
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Embodied timeline: the coffee’s warmth, street sounds, someone’s voice.
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Screen timeline: the latent next thing (message, alert, clip, headline), algorithmically queued to trespass.
Interrupted Realism represents this bi-temporality. Its techniques include: (1) intrusions (paratextual stubs, timestamps, feeds), (2) format hybridity (images, “posts,” lyric shards), (3) oscillating registers (vernacular ↔ theoretical), and (4) broken scene flows whose resumptions never fully re-stabilize the diegesis.
A Typology with Precedents
Literary Lineage
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David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996).
Wallace’s notorious footnotes reroute reading into recursive shuttling, simulating tab-hopping before browsers normalized it. The book’s meta-infrastructure models cognitive overhang: always another referent, another “window” to consult. Interrupted Realism takes this from print experiment to ambient condition. -
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (2000).
Typographic disorientation (rotated pages, scattered notes, textual tunnels) materializes interruption in the codex. It forces the body to comply with form (turn, flip, search), prefiguring how interfaces choreograph attention. -
Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010).
The PowerPoint chapter reveals how business software colonizes narrative expression. The novel renders cross-media incursions—a keynote within a novel—announcing a world where formats leak.
Further print precedents: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (die-cut erasures) and Abrams/Dorst’s S. (marginalia as parallel story) dramatize multiplex reading, though as crafted anomalies rather than everyday ontology.
Cinematic Lineage
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Jean-Luc Godard.
In Pierrot le Fou and later Goodbye to Language, Godard interrupts with slogans, jingles, and derealizing 3D; he insists cinema be an essayistic collage—an early pedagogy in not being lulled. -
Michael Haneke, Funny Games (1997/2007).
Characters address the camera, breaking the fourth wall to indict spectatorship. The viewer loses the protection of distance—anticipating a social media era where viewers are visible. -
Screenlife films (Unfriended, Searching).
Narration unfolds on desktops; the diegetic space is the interface. These films literalize a world in which the screen is the room and interruption is built into every scene’s mise-en-scène. -
Kiarostami, von Trier, and hybrid forms.
Kiarostami’s Close-Up collapses documentary and fiction; von Trier’s The Five Obstructions makes constraint the motor of interruption. The point across lineages: the interruptive impulse has a long genealogy; our moment turns impulse into infrastructure.
Case Study: Cem Akaş’s The Meaning of Words (Sözcüklerin Anlamı, 2025)
Akaş’s novel offers a remarkably sustained articulation of Interrupted Realism in contemporary Turkish fiction. Its through-line—a relationship between Demir and Duru in Istanbul—is continuously spliced with short aphorisms, pseudo-academic mini-essays, stream fragments, song-lyric bursts, and topical micro-commentaries. Crucially, these are not decorative “cuts” between chapters; they permeate scenes and reset the reader’s attention throughout. The result is a reading experience structurally isomorphic to daily life: you cannot remain in uninterrupted narrative flow. You read as you live—by integrating interruption.
The Big Interrupt: World-Scale Blackout, World-Scale Feed
Early on, a three-day global power outage becomes the novel’s macro-interruption: an event whose cause spawns rumor ecologies (state conspiracy, solar anomalies, “aliens”). The blackout is not only plot; it functions like a media-ontological allegory—a massive switch toggled off and on, after which conjectural feeds (theories, surveillance snippets, “viral” explanations) proliferate. These proliferations appear within the prose as interleaved registers: pseudo-news tone, philosophical riff, sardonic aside, discursive “post.”
Micro-Interruptions: Aphorism, Slogan, Lyric, Post
Throughout, the narrative inserts single-line maxims, often typographically offset—e.g., “Happiness is an attitude,” or “Solidarity> Justice,” or “middleman tactics.” These operate like short-form posts—Tweet-length interjections that reframe the scene you just read or are about to read. Song-lyric shavings (e.g., lvbel c5, Sagopa Kajmer, no.1 & Melek Mosso) puncture realist flow with audio-memetic recall, mimicking TikTok’s lurch from image to hook. The effect is not digression but concurrent channeling—as if the book “keeps one earbud in.”
Paratextual Encyclopedism: Pseudo-entries and Mini-Essays
The book periodically presents encyclopedic stubs (“Origins of Bodily Hair”), mock-policy notes (“A Detached Relationship” on “shoes” as a thought experiment of state distance), speculative socio-economics, and micro-histories. These are not appositive ornaments; they reroute attention to broader systems—law, bureaucracy, infrastructure—then drop you back into Demir/Duru. The alternation reproduces the cognitive commute between intimate focus and systemic noise that defines contemporary life.
Object Montage and Memory Architecture
A recurring scene involves Duru arranging a long table of historical ephemera (a 1920s hat, war ration card, Eurovision costume, Ecevit’s blue shirt, Demirel’s hat, vintage banknotes, bus tickets, toy cars, and so on). The inventory—rendered as a single breathless list—functions as montage by nouns. This list performs a museum-like interrupted realism: an ostensibly realist room becomes an archive interface. The eye no longer lingers on a single object but scrolls across a feed of artifacts, with algorithmic adjacency (why these neighbors?) prompting implicit commentary. The scene is realist, yet the experience is digital: selection-and-scan rather than focal immersion.
Language Games: The “Love Dictionary” and Private Protocols
Mid-novel, Demir and Duru develop a private lexicon (a “Love Dictionary”): coinages (“epermek”), semantic swaps (e.g., reversing everyday words), and re-authorings that construct a couple-specific protocol. This is not mere whimsy; it allegorizes how platforms shape relationality through idiosyncratic codes (emojis, stickers, in-jokes, meme templates). Interruptions here are intra-personal: lovers interpose a parallel language that intermittently replaces the shared code of the social. The reader must learn and constantly context-switch, as one does across apps and groups.
Embodied Crisis and Screen Relief
A vivid episode: Demir’s food poisoning leads to hospital serum, narrated with somatic immediacy (the fear, the physical humiliation). The scene is repeatedly cross-wired with self-mockery and memetic tone—illness and feed voice interpenetrate. The novel refuses to let the body and the interface separate; its realism is the mutual contamination of the two timelines.
Street Politics as Attention Ecology
The text stages street gatherings, policing, tear gas, and ambient rumor—juxtaposed with delivery apps, pizza orders, and platform logistics. It reads like a multi-modal notebook: protest chants, policy snippets, Telegram-style whispers, and personal asides coexist. Realist description is thus interlaced with the signatures of media circulation. Politics appears as an attention ecology—who can interrupt whom, when, and with what force.
Why This Is Interrupted Realism (and Not Just Postmodernism)
Formally, the book’s interruptions are not metatextual winks or ironies; they are phenomenological commitments. The oscillation between scene and shard, intimacy and post, is not an authorial flourish but the minimum realism of life lived among feeds. The work thus substantiates this article’s thesis: interruption is the condition of representation rather than a device chosen to undermine it. The reader experiences the novel in the same way one experiences the day: a bi-temporal synthesis performed on the fly.
Poetics of Interrupted Realism: Devices and Effects
To consolidate a theoretical vocabulary, I propose five recurrent devices and their cognitive effects:
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Shard Insertion (SI): one-to-three-line aphorisms, slogans, lyric hooks.
Effect: reset attention; prompt lateral association; simulate “post” cadence. -
Format Hybridity (FH): fictional “posts,” chat snippets, faux policy notes, pseudo-entries.
Effect: format switching; trains the reader to infer interface without seeing it. -
Montage-List (ML): noun strings, enumerations, object feeds, inventoried scenes.
Effect: scan-reading; foregrounds selection and adjacency over depth. -
Register Oscillation (RO): colloquial ↔ theoretical, intimate ↔ systemic.
Effect: context-switch cost; dramatizes the labor of synthesis across codes. -
Broken Scene Continuity (BSC): scenes that never fully stabilize before another mode intrudes.
Effect: unfinishedness; models the felt impossibility of total immersion.
Akaş’s novel deploys all five in dense rotation. The repetition, crucially, is not redundancy; it is how the book models habituation to interruption.
Ethics and Politics: Interruption as Exposure and Care
Interruption is often lamented as attention’s degradation. Yet, as Brecht knew, breaking flow can have ethical force: it exposes the machinery of illusion and the violence of norms. Interrupted Realism may re-politicize realism by making structural forces felt—not through exposé alone, but through the kinesthetics of reading: you feel the cost of switching codes, of resuming threads, of reconciling intimate and systemic claims.
At the same time, the novel’s couple-lexicon and moments of care (coffee, dogs, vernacular jokes) suggest a counter-ethics: to hold attention for another inside the storm of interruptions. Interrupted Realism can thus stage micro-shelters—not as retreats from the world, but as practices of sustained regard within it.
Methodological Implications
For narrative theory, Interrupted Realism urges a pivot from plot/formalism to attention-formalism: how works choreograph perceptual switching, memory buffers, and resumption markers. For media studies, it encourages analysis of format signatures inside ostensibly “print” artifacts; novels are now interface emulators. For comparative literature, it highlights cross-cultural convergences: different languages and markets may invent distinct devices to formalize the same ontological condition.
Conclusion: Realism after Platforms
The classical realist novel emerges with bourgeois interiority; the interrupted realist novel emerges with platformized attention. The aim is not to fetishize distraction nor to mourn a lost unity, but to document the bi-temporal life we already lead. Cem Akaş’s The Meaning of Words stands as a prime, formally coherent answer to the question: What becomes of realism when the screen timeline never ceases to trespass? Its answer is not resignation but recognition: a poetics for making sense under conditions of permanent coitus interruptus.
AI-assisted
Notes
Benjamin Halligan, “WR: Mysteries of the Organism by Raymond Durgnat,” Senses of Cinema 11 (December 2000), online. Halligan characterizes Makavejev’s montage as “a heightened, interrupted realism.” sensesofcinema.com
Alexandra Watson, Deviant Realisms and the Cinematic Representation of the Transgressed Body (PhD diss., University of Cape Town, 2017), esp. Introduction: “films that share an interrupted realism brought on by a deviation from the norms of continuity editing.” open.uct.ac.za+1
Review of Nicholas Robinette, Realism, Form, and the Postcolonial Novel (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry (2016), noting the presence of terms such as “experimental realism, interrupted realism, or epistemological realism.” Cambridge University Press & Assessment
Ástráður Eysteinsson, “Realism, Modernism, and the Aesthetics of Interruption,” in The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 179–242. (See publisher/JSTOR index pages confirming chapter title and pagination.) De Gruyter BrillJSTOR
“Interruptions (epic theatre),” overview and citations in the tradition of Brechtian technique. Vikipedi
Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (trans. Anna Bostock; London/New York: Verso, 1983), esp. remarks on the retarding function of interruptions and episodic framing. odradeksjourney.files.wordpress.com
“Epic Theatre,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, emphasizing direct address and the deliberate interruption of storylines as core to the form. Encyclopedia Britannica
Ariane Luckey, “Artist’s Statement,” describing obliteration/simplification that yields a “personal interrupted realism.” Ariane Luckey
Steven Sergiovanni, “Pattern Recognition: Jered Sprecher at Jeff Bailey Gallery,” New American Paintings blog (2012), describing “Memory Device’s interrupted realism.” newamericanpaintings.com
Illustration Art blog (2019), comment thread noting critics’ coinages including “interrupted realism” for a mixed figurative/abstract painterly tendency (Kanevsky-adjacent). illustrationart.blogspot.com
John Seed, Disrupted Realism: Paintings for a Distracted World (Schiffer Publishing, 2019); see publisher’s précis situating the tendency as a contemporary movement. Schifferbooks
For an early journalistic instance, see BG News (BGSU), “Interrupted Realism,” 10 December 1965 (archival index reference). lib.bgsu.edu
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Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 91.
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Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 71.
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T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), l. 430.
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John Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” Atlantic Monthly 220, no. 2 (1967): 29–34.
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Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv.
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Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 2.
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Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 239.
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Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 7.
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Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), esp. 27–48 (numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability).
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N. Katherine Hayles, “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes,” Profession (2007): 187–199.
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Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013), 9.
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Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 1–18.
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David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).
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Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (New York: Pantheon, 2000).
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Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).
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Jean-Luc Godard, Pierrot le fou (1965) and Goodbye to Language (2014), films.
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Michael Haneke, Funny Games (1997/2007), film.
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Abbas Kiarostami, Close-Up (1990), film.
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Timur Bekmambetov et al., Unfriended (2014) and Aneesh Chaganty, Searching (2018), films.
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Cem Akaş, Sözcüklerin Anlamı [The Meaning of Words] (Istanbul: CAN, 2025).
