Becker might have been thinking of formalistic critics like Northrop Frye, for whom realism was in some fundamental sense anti-literary: "One of the most familiar and important features of literature," Frye had declared in his famous Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, "is the absence of a controlling aim of descriptive accuracy". Becker's complaint also proved to be prophetic, though. In the succeeding decades, philosophers and critics both opposed to realism and simply uninterested in it continued to replicate, and indeed to reinforce, the attitude that he had characterized. In an influential essay from 1982, for instance, Jean-Francois Lyotard collapsed realism into a superficial conception of mimesis, loftily insisting that it "always stands somewhere between academicism and kitsch"; realism's "only definition, he concluded, "is that it intends to avoid the question of reality implicated in that of art".
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