In his recently published bookThe Antinomies of Realism, Fredric Jameson presents his take on the pervasive struggle between the realist mode's origins and its ostensible demise. Throughout his career, Jameson has been dissatisfied with the numerous binary oppositions into which realism is so often inserted and the insufficiently historicized value judgments that tend to go with them. In this new work, Jameson argues that realism is instead caught between and constituted by the opposing poles of story and affect. He argues that “the irrevocable antagonism between [these] twin (and entwined) forces . . . are never reconciled, never fold back into one another in some ultimate reconciliation and identity; and the very force and pungency of the realist writing [here examined] is predicated on that tension, which must remain an impossible one, under pain of losing itself altogether and dissipating if it is ever resolved in favor of one of the parties to the struggle” (11). Jameson locates the “final battle” between the antinomies of realism “in the microstructures of language” and “against the dominance of point of view which seems to hold the affective impulses in check and lend them the organizing attribution of a central consciousness” (11). For Jameson, this formal and linguistic face-off “exhaust[s] and destroy[s]” realism, and whatever “odd assortment of random tools and techniques” we recognize in the post-nineteenth-century world are but remnants of realism's “shriveled posterity” (11). Thus, Jameson insists the book of realism is closed, and as Harry Shaw has noted, “he appears . . . to have maintained a consistent line throughout his career” (Narrating Reality 27n31).