It is not a cinematic realism though.
The realism is not a conventional everyday realism: the situations themselves are fantastic, though plausible.
It is absurd to insist, as Flaubert did, that Madame Bovary is not a work of realism.
He's not a disciple of realism for its own sake; neither is he from the shambolic, guerilla school of film-making known as mumblecore.
The call "To the things themselves" is not a demand for realism, because the things at stake are the acts of consciousness and the objective entities that get constituted in them: these things form the realm of what Husserl calls the phenomena.
"Now is not a time for realism," Margaret Atwood said in a recent interview with NPR, succinctly summarizing why so many literary writers flock to fantasy, to dystopia, to amplifying the threat of impending problems -- environmental and political -- that aren't yet a reality.
A result is that he leavens his yearning for smarter, more nimble government with a realism not always found among Europeans.
Among the most popular comics on the E.C. list were Kurtzman's two war series, "Frontline Combat" and "Two-Fisted Tales," which displayed a realism not present in similar comic books.
Think of it as a realism not of bombed streets and starving children but of starting to sing in the shower and then trailing off, distracted by a stream of consciousness about what you have to do when you reach the office.
