Define the concepts 'realism', 'fantasy', and 'utopia' - Essay Example

Realism Realism is widely-known since it contains cosmopolitan elements most people would agree to be the truth. It is a concept used to rationalise everything in the world, unifying how everyone sees reality through measurable and specific attributes (Morris, 2003). However, realism is not fully grasped by every individual due to innate differences. Each person experiences some parts of reality but not fully, making individual persons and their existences separate from absolute reality. This detachment from absolute reality is constant through time and space.

Because each person has a unique set of experiences and memories by being in various places and periods in time, it would be impossible to say that how a person sees reality is the absolute truth since a person’s collection of knowledge and memories affects how reality is felt and experienced (Berger, 2008; Searle, 1995). It false to assume one person sees ultimate reality, but is socially acceptable that every person sees reality according to how one reacts to it, believing this to be the truth.

The idea took a long time to form and even longer time to conceptualise due to difficulties in uniformly defining realism and reality. Before realism was coined, cultures come to accept everything simply what these things seem to them without any further questioning. The advent of Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution started people questioning what reality is, and defines this further through the growth of various fields of knowledge such as sciences and humanities. This makes it easier to create a representation of what reality truly is by delineating what defines something real and what makes it unreal, as agreeable to the majority.

However the emergence of a culture giving priority or power to entities bearing the highest amount of money or capital such as rich or influential people skewed this balance of equal opportunities in presenting individual realities, giving them greater capacities to deliver their ideas and perceptions of their own reality to others compared to those lacking resources to do the same. If the powerful person or entity communicates its reality in attractive forms like literature among impressionable people with limited experiences, these audiences will be convinced of its absolute truth, twisting the people’s individual perception of realism and taking its face value for convenience.

But people who totally reject and disagree with this reality do so because they either have an entirely different sense of realism based on their own experiences, or they already created opposing belief systems far from how powerful entities sell their reality. This keeps distrusting people unresponsive to mass-produced reality and fully aware of its differences with their own, shaping their own senses of realism. Fantasy and Utopia Realism has its antitheses: fantasy and utopia. For many, fantasy is something unchained, imaginary and a form of escape from one’s insight on reality (Jackson, 1981).

In this made-up world, ideas and thoughts are not confined by others’ definition and view of reality. Impossible things in realism is acceptable as true or absolute in fantasy, including the reversal of social codes, gender, good and evil, or anything most people find troublesome in the reality they experience. Fantasy bluntly or subtly rejects the reality in most people by showing the