Irrealism is a term that has been used by various writers in the fields of philosophy, literature, and art to denote specific modes of unreality and/or the problems in concretely defining reality.
In literature, the term irrealism was first used extensively in the United States in the 1970s to describe the post-realist "new fiction" of writers such as Donald Barthelme or John Barth.
[citation needed] John Gardner, in The Art of Fiction, cites in this context the work of Barthelme and its "seemingly limitless ability to manipulate [literary] techniques as modes of apprehension [which] apprehend nothing.
Thus irreal works such as Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics and Jorge Luis Borges' Ficciones can be seen as an attempt to find a new allegorical language to explain our changed perceptions of the world that have been brought about by our scientific and technical culture, especially concepts such as quantum physics or the theory of relativity.
Such fiction is said to emphasize the fact that human consciousness, being finite in nature, can never make complete sense of, or successfully order, a universe that is infinite in its aspects and possibilities.
Garret Rowlan, writing in The Cafe Irreal, writes that the malaise present in the work of the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, "which recalls Kafka, has to do with the sense of another world lurking, hovering like the long shadows that dominate de Chirico's paintings, which frequently depict a landscape at twilight's uncertain hour.
Together with the Estonian poet, writer and art critic Ilmar Laaban, they developed their concept of Irrealism through several essays, exhibitions, projects, manifest and a book, "Irréalisation".