Showing papers on "Realism published in 1970"

Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl's Phenomenology

Abstract: Simone de Beauvoir has written of the sense of excitement that marked Jean-Paul Sartre's first encounter with the thought of Husserl and Heidegger. Perhaps no work of Sartre's communicates this excitement, and the reason for it, quite so transparently as his brief 1939 essay on Husserl's notion of intentionality. Husserl here appears as a revolutionary, almost as a saviour, who has provided the necessary key for putting philosophy back in touch with the ordinary experience which both French realism and French idealism had vainly sought to characterize. Realism and idealism alike had been guilty in effect of a reduplication of things in consciousness, dependence on an often unexpressed correspondence theory which made mental surrogates for the real the only reality available to man. But if the present essay testifies to Sartre's attempt to return French thought to immediate contact with things, it enters into a fascinating dialectical tension with another of Sartre's chief motives—to purify immediate exper...

Mach, Einstein, and the Search for Reality

Abstract: In the history of ideas of our century, there is a chapter that might be entitled ‘The Philosophical Pilgrimage of Albert Einstein’, a pilgrimage from a philosophy of science in which sensationism and empiricism were at the center, to one in which the basis was a rational realism. This essay,* a portion of a more extensive study1, is concerned with Einstein’s gradual philosophical reorientation, particularly as it has become discernible during the work on his largely unpublished scientific correspondence.2

Christianity and Symbolic Realism

Abstract: l7here is probably nothing more important than intellectual history to help us understand how our culture has become so fragmented and dissociated that we find it almost impossible to communicate the integrated meaning our young people so passionately require of us. Aware of my lack of competence in intellectual history I must nonetheless venture into it in order to deal with one central aspect of this fragmentation, namely, the split between theological and scientific (and here I mean mainly social scientific) language about Christianity or more generally the split between religious man and scientific man in the West. Without going back before the seventeenth century one can perhaps say that from that time almost to the present the dominant theological defense of Christianity has been what may be called "historical realism." The roots of this historical realism can be traced back to biblical historicism, Greek rationalism, and the new awareness of scientific method emerging in the seventeenth century. The figural and symbolic interpretation of scripture which was characteristic of medieval thought was almost eliminated by Reformation and counter-Reformation theology. Modern consciousness required clear and distinct ideas, definite unambiguous relationships, and a conception of the past "as it actually was." The proponents of "reasonable Christianity" worked out a theology which seemed to fit these requirements. It is true that some of the most significant theological minds-Pascal, Edwards, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard-don't quite fit this formulation. Nevertheless for broad strata of educated laymen and above all for the secular intellectuals it was this understanding of Christianity that was decisive. Lest anyone think this kind of Christian thought is dead let him pause for a moment to consider the recent popularity of apologists who have argued that "Christ must have been who he said he was or he was the greatest fraud in history." There have always been those willing to pick up the gauntlet with that kind of argument. Particularly in the eighteenth century many secular intellectuals argued that Christ or, if not Christ, certainly the priests were indeed frauds. Meeting Christianity on the ground of historical realism they rejected it. When faced with the inevitable question of how something clearly fraudulent and indeed absurd could have been so powerful in human history they answered that religion was propagated for the sake of political despotism, maintained by an unholy alliance of priestcraft and political despotism. This argument was a species of "consequential reductionism," the explanation of religion in terms of its functional consequences, which in cruder or subtler form has

Hale's Tours: Ultrarealism In the Pre-1910 Motion Picture

Abstract: In the course of its erratic 75-year history, the motion picture has suffered continuous technological experimentation in its owners' attempts to achieve maximum realism in the production and exhibition of its products. Over the years, showmen have moved steadily toward a less stylized, more naturalistic cinema, beginning with the addition of color, then monophonic sound, stereophonic sound, three-dimensional images, and, finally, widescreen aspect ratios. Indeed, something of a high point in motion picture realism seemed to have been reached in 1955 when the late Walt Disney introduced his spectacular "Trip to the Moon" show at Disneyland, California. This continuing attraction takes the form of a gigantic rocket, with seating for 150 passengers, complete on the inside with incandescent dials, blinking lights, airplane hostesses, and all the other theatrical accoutrements of a well-appointed flying saucer. Following a dramatic countdown, the seats shake, dials move, the roar of the motors is heard, and-perfectly synchronized-a realistically animated film of travel through outer space is projected onto motion picture screens above and below the audience. All effects combine to produce a theatrically convincing illusion of space travel. Impressive as this imaginary voyage is, however, there is nothing new about it. As early as 1895, novelist H. G. Wells and British film pioneer Robert Paul applied for a patent on a similar motion picture designed to simulate travel through time and space, along the lines of Wells' sciencefiction novel, The Time Machine. The members of the audience were to be seated on platforms which rocked to and fro, and which moved toward and away from a screen onto which still and motion picture scenes were to be projected.1 It was an ingenious and ambitious design for its day. Be

The illusion of life : American realism as a literary form

Abstract: What is realism? This tiresome question has plagued many of us at one time or another, and the answers have often been unclear and contradictory. Such literary terms have been in disrepute recently not only because of objections to labeling writers, but also because of doubts about their validity. Mr. Kolb sets out here to define realism again, but also, and more importantly, to restore American realistic writers of the late nineteenth century to their just status as literary artists. There has always been some feeling that realism was not an artistic movement; that the works of realistic writers were dull, fact-stuffed accounts of uninteresting people in boring situations; that the realists lacked any largeness of view. Even today, the general public does not willingly read much of Henry James, and none of Wm. Dean Howells, though it will occasionally offer conventional praise to Mark Twain.

The Term and Concept of Symbolism in Literary History

Abstract: of this paper. The word goes back to ancient Greece and had, there, a complex history which has not, I suspect, been traced adequately in the only history of the term, Max Schlesinger's Geschichte des Symbols, published in 1912.x What I want to discuss is something much more specific: not even symbol and symbolism in literature but the term and concept of symbolism as a period in literary history. It can, I suggest, be conveniently used as a general term for the literature in all Western countries following the decline of 19th-century realism and naturalism and preceding the rise of the new avant-garde movements: futurism, expressionism, surrealism, existentialism, or whatever else. How has it come about? Can such a use be justified? We must distinguish among different problems: the history of the word need not be identical with the history of the concept as we might today formulate it. We must ask, on the one hand, what the contemporaries meant by it, who called himself a "symbolist" or who wanted to be included in a movement called "symbolism," and on the other hand, what modern scholarship might decide about who is to be included and what characteristics of the period seem decisive. In speaking of "symbolism" as a period-term located in history we must also think of its situation in space. Literary terms most frequently radiate from one center but do so unevenly; they seem to stop at the frontiers of some countries or cross them and languish there or, surprisingly, flourish more vigorously on a new soil. A geography of literary terms is needed which might attempt to account for the spread and distribution of terms by examining rival terms or accidents of biography or simply the total situation of a literature. There seems to be a widespread agreement that the literary history

Periodismo narrativo y estética de la recepción. La ruptura del canon y la nueva crónica latinoamericana

Abstract: The new Latin American journalism reformulates now the chronic and the rol of informing, introducing innovative ways of narrative that updates the legacy of the local narrative aesthetics, as once happened with the publishing boom of Latin American novel that broke the hitherto dominant literary canon, rising a phenomenon of mass consumption and unprecedented reception in the cultural history of Spain and Latin America. Exploring the logic of textual mediation, associated with this process from a critique of the aesthetics of reception elements, provides interesting new conceptions of journalism in the global era. This article discusses how to understand the necessary continuity and breakdown of the boom in Latin American literature with the new generation of writers, in the passage of what some authors synthesized and summarized as the transition of magical realism to realism magical. This is a new generation of Latin American journalists who stands for a renewed narrative journalism and chronic, beyond the impact that supposed the new American journalism and providing new interpretive keys to rethink identity and Latin culture in the regional communication geopolitics.

Discussing quality: critical vocabularies and popular television drama

Abstract: British soap operas have a history which is rooted in realism, a strong sense of community and the serious treatment of social issues. This essay argues that in the late 90s/early 2000s British soaps have adopted a more melodramatic aesthetic with an emphasis on the isolated individual, extreme situations, symbolic landscapes and moral polarity. Following Zygmunt Bauman, it suggests that such changes reflect the feeling that the idea of society is under siege.

KUMASI REALISM, 1951 - 2007: An African Modernism

Abstract: & Western approaches to Africa's visual culture have until recently separated 'traditional' from 'modern' as if the two categories had no common ground, and as if only the former was authentically African Yet 'tradition' is also an active process of handing on, one subject to evolution, development and history This book explores a burgeoning body of West African artistic production that draws upon photography, advertising, graphic design, European art history and Ghanaian history and culture As such it constitutes an envisioning of a local modernity centred upon Kumasi, a vibrant trading city at the centre of local, national and international networks, whether historical, economic, political, educational, religious or aesthetic The art described here, whatever its immediate purpose, reflects and interprets this intense and unique local context Among the Ghanaian painters discussed are EV Asihene, Grace Kwami, EKJ Tetteh, Ablade Glover, Ato Delaquis, B Offei Nyako, Atta Kwami, kari'kacha seid'ou, Bob Acheampong and many others whose practice was college based Kwami also discusses the art and lives of Kumasi's leading sign painters - King Samino (King Samino Sign Art Services), Alex Amofa (Supreme Art Works), Kwame Akoto (Almighty God Art Works), Isaac Azey Otchere (Azey Alberto Art Sign Service), and Isumaila Moro (Iss Hi-Tech Prints) - thereby exploring the interrelationship of two entwined traditions, two art worlds of modern painting centred at either the university and/or the signpainter's workshop

Realism and the Confessional Mode of Robert Lowell

Abstract: As long ago as 1925, Boris Tomashevsky, a leading Russian formalist critic, observed that the "autobiographical poem" is one that mythologizes the poet's life in accordance with the conventions of his time. It relates not what has occurred but what should have occurred, presenting an idealized image of the poet as representative of his literary school.' James Merrill, one of our leading "confessional" poets, made the same point in a recent interview when he said: "Confessional poetry... is a literary convention like any other, the problem being to make it sound as if it were true." Whether or not the poet is presenting the actual facts of his experience is irrelevant, but he must give the "illusion of a True Confession."2 "There's a good deal of tinkering with fact," Robert Lowell said of Life Studies in a Paris Review interview, but of course "the reader was to believe he was getting the real Robert Lowell."3 These reminders of the role convention plays even in autobiographical poetry are salutary at a time when the so-called "confessional poem"-surely our predominant lyric genre today-is consistently treated by critics as confession rather than as poetry. When

Turgenev's Aesthetic and Western Realism

Abstract: IN THE PRESENT paper I seek to summarize Turgenev's aesthetic ideas with a view to their application in his art, and confront them with the ideas of those of his Western contemporaries with whom his name is most often associated: the group of realists who in the 1870s used to gather around Flaubert on Sunday afternoons. A catalog of them is given in Guy de Maupassant's etude, "Gustave Flaubert."' The more important of them were (in the order in which they appear in Maupassant's sketch) Hippolyte Taine, Alphonse Daudet, iAmile Zola, Edmond de Goncourt. I add one name not listed by Maupassant (who, of course, was one of those present), Henry James. Significantly, Turgenev himself is listed as the very first arrival. Shared artistic preferences were, no doubt, the principal reason why these writers sought each other's company. Paul Bourget, who points this out,2 also draws attention to some more general attitudes shared by Turgenev and his friends-a certain cosmopolitanism, a thoroughgoing pessimism and taedium vitae,3 and a tendency toward analyticism and psychological introspection. As to the last trait, both Turgenev and Flaubert would have themselves refused to acknowledge it.4 But the evidence is on hand-Turgenev wrote his "Diary of A Superfluous Man" and other similar pieces long before Dostoevskij produced his Notes fromt the Underground. There are some differences also. For example, Flaubert is a determined opponent of postivism (and

Romanticism and Realism in the Fascism of Drieu La Rochelle

Abstract: French fascist ideology has often been described by scholars as being essentially "romantic'" in nature, as a kind of sentimental, emotional fling whose participants tended to be irrational, subjective, and aesthetic in their approach to politics rather than realistic, objective, and tough-minded.' It has been argued that this is one reason literary intellectuals like Robert Brasillach, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Alphonse de Chateaubriant, Abel Bonnard, Lucien Rebatet, and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle were drawn to fascism in the 1930's: it was a politics of romanticism, "le romantisme fasciste" Paul Serant has called it; a union of "politics and aesthetics" another scholar has written.2 Thus Robert Brasillach of the pro-fascist journal, Je suis partout, described fascism as a kind of "poetry" and was enchanted by "poetic" images of Hitler youth around campfires, mass meetings at Nuremberg, and heroic moments of the\ past. Certainly there is a good deal of truth to this portrait of French fascism and its mystique: a strong current of romanticism3 does run through the writings of many French fascist literati. What such a portrait neglects, however, is the strong current of realism which also runs through the ideology.

Response to Comments on "Christianity and Symbolic Realism"

Abstract: Father Burtchaell has raised some important issues with respect to the "evil temper" which often infects methodological disagreement in the study of religion and has briefly suggested some of the structural grounds for it. The subject is importantand explosive-and would itself serve as the basis of a joint session of the American Academy of Religion and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Perhaps for too long we have discussed this issue in the corridors and the coffee breaks and not in the meeting hall. Those who were present in Sanders Theater at Harvard on 25 October 1969 were treated to a display of a good deal of "evil temper," not all of it in connection with my paper. I cannot say that anything said there was of much help in getting to the bottom of the difficulty nor do I think this is the moment for me to pursue the issue. Instead let me attempt to reply to the objections of Professors Klausner and Nelson. My first reaction is quite simply dismay. It is hard for me to understand how my remarks could be taken in ways obviously (to me) not intended. Perhaps part of the problem rests in the brevity of my paper. Fortunately it will soon appear in a collection of my essays, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a PostTraditional World, which Harper and Row will publish this spring, so that the context of my recent thought will help to fill out its implications. Among other things, that collection should correct Professor Nelson's impression of the "tenuousness" of my "interest in the myriad historic embodiments of the religious life," since the book is mostly concerned with such embodiments studied from a historical and sociological point of view. The intellectual autobiography which introduces that volume should disabuse Professor Nelson of another of his notions. I hope it will there be clear to any reader how utterly alien to my position is any kind of totalism. But I must say here that the fact that both Professors Klausner and Nelson detect just below the surface of my paper the sound of the inquisitor's lash if not the click of the storm-trooper's boots is itself an indication of how far the study of religion has to go before we reach the calm heights of scientific neutrality. It seems, since I have failed to communicate, that the best use of my space here would be to attempt again to say what I do mean. But perhaps first I should catalogue briefly some of the things I do not mean that Professors Klausner and Nelson have attributed to me. Symbolic realism as I use the term does not mean "the rejection of the separation between subject and object" (Klausner) nor do I anywhere in my paper assert "that there is no ground whatever for a separation between subject and object" (Nelson). On the contrary my whole discussion is based on an acceptance of the subject/object schema. I object only to the attribution of reality solely to the world of objects while neglecting the reality of subjective existence or of those symbol systems, especially religious and artistic, which try to express the relationship between subjects and objects and the whole of which they are parts. While I do stress the role of subjective factors, a point to which so close a scholar of Weber and Freud as Professor Nelson can hardly object, I emphatically do not "conceive the religious to remain in the sphere of the intrapsychic." Perhaps I can return to these points when I try briefly below to restate my position. The point on which Professors Klausner and Nelson agree most heartily is that

The Grotesque Children of The Rose Tattoo

Abstract: THAT REALISM SHOULD BE THE CONVENTION fundamental to the work of Tennessee Williams is altogether logical. Until his late adolescence, Williams had little opportunity to see any form of theater other than the American cinema, and this form, of course, is firmly grounded in the realistic approach. Even the external shape of Williams's theater shows especially clear evidence of this cinematic influence: a succession of episodes, “fade-outs" and "fade-ins," background music, gauze scrims, and expressive lights focussed to simulate "close-ups"—all devices immediately recognizable as• film technique, itself a more poetic kind of realism.

Modern Canadian Poetry

Abstract: The difficulty in writing about a modern movement in Canadian poetry is that many of its concerns appear to be local and national in a world in which, as Northrop Frye observes, "the nation is rapidly ceasing to be the real defining unit of society."' Obviously, the view that we are now "moving towards a post-national world"2 makes more cultural than political or social sense, though it is for that reason that the contemporary arts seem more closely connected with revolutionary attitudes than with traditional values. It is this revolutionary aspect of the " 'modern' element in the culture of the last century"3 that occupies Frye in The Modern Century. Considered as style, the modern exhibits characteristically anarchic features: deliberate fragmenting of literary form, either through disorder or parody; irrationalism; disruption or inversion of value systems; and disoriented versions of perception. In turn, the radicalism of style connects with radical, anarchic social (or anti-social) attitudes, particularly in what Frye calls a Freudian proletarianism that seeks to overthrow through pornography or sexual assault the repressive anxietystructure of society. What is modern in Canadian poetry, then, we would want to connect with aspects of radicalism in its style and attitude. What, in fact, we appear to be left with, as a sort of national residue, is that which seems impossible to reconcile with radicalism in our poetry: its nostalgia, its longing for history, its impulse to define a Canadian past and to create a useable tradition. On the whole, the sort of criticism which sees poetry as a reflection of environment simply resorts to any one of a number of dualisms to explain this apparent contradiction of the local and international in Canadian writing. Occasionally, we hear of the tension in Canadian life between vulgarity and daintiness. There are other, familiar pairs: American and British influences on Canadian poetry; realism and formalism; colonialism and nationalism; originality and imitativeness. Projected as a genuine rift in Canadian life, dualism becomes the ultimate secret, what Malcolm Ross speaks of as "the broad design of our unique, inevitable, and precarious cultural pattern." "This pattern, by the force of historical and geographical circumstances," Ross goes on to say, "is a pattern of opposites in tension ... the federal-regional tension . . . the American-British tension. . . the French-English tension."4 If Ross's is an extreme version of dualism in Canadian life, it at least has the merit of defining one limit of our discussion: poetry dissolves into the dualities of space and time. But time and space (or history and geography) can be resolved into poetry, perhaps at another extreme limit. Seen as sociology, con-

Scientific and Humanistic Study of Religion: A Comment on "Christianity and Symbolic Realism"

Abstract: Professor Bellah's paper is sensitive and eloquent. 1 An internal criticism picking at slight flaws would be unworthy of it. I will begin by responding to Professor Bellah on the ground he has chosen, that of religion as a system of action. Later I will return to my own ground, that of the study of religion as a system of knowledge. Professor Bellah opens with a dirge for our fragmented culture. The split between theological and social scientific language about Christianity, an expression of the split between religious and scientific man, provides his illustration. It is fashionable to trace some painful social conflicts we now endure to a hiatus between technical and moral culture and then to reason that (1) technical thought and evaluative thought each has its academic guardian and that (2) the broad cultural split is not unrelated to the bureaucratic division of labor in the academy. It is difficult to believe that the world perspectives of contemporary scientists and humanists could be more disjointed than those of huntsmen, pastoralists, and agriculturalists have been throughout history. Further, while we do seem to drive our technology with adolescent morality, the main lines of contemporary social cleavage are not those of that cultural cleavage. The warring groups in our society do not want for communication with or understanding of their opponents. Articulateness about and empathy for the antagonists' philosophy and interests are foreplay to debunking those philosophies and attacking those interests. Mutual understanding between executioners and victims is the tragedian mark of our time. As for the academic division of labor, Durkheim's affirmation of it as a source of social integration rather than as a source of social fragmentation still has a ring of validity.