Showing papers on "Realism published in 1973"

Karl Llewellyn and the Realist Movement

Abstract: Part I. The Rise of the Realist Movement, 1870-1931: Introduction: 1. Langdell's Harvard 2. Corbin's Yale, 1897-1918 3. Columbia in the 1920s 4. The aftermath of the split 5. The realist controversy, 1930-1 Part II. The Life and Work of Karl Llewellyn: A Case Study: 6. The man 7. Two early works 8. The Cheyenne Way 9. Law in our society 10. The Common Law Tradition 11. The genesis of the uniform commercial code 12. The jurisprudence of the uniform commercial code 13. Miscellaneous writings 14. The significance of Llewellyn: an assessment Part III. Conclusion: 15. The significance of realism.

Soviet Socialist Realism

Abstract: In 1934 Stalin's son-in-law Andrei Zhdanov gave a speech at the All Union Congress of Soviet Writers in which he asserted Socialist Realism to be the only form of art approved by the party. Henceforth, artists would be required to provide a "historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development �combined with the task of educating workers in the spirit of communism". Zhdanov also repeated Stalin's phrase describing the artist as an "engineer of the human soul".

The Form of the Sentimental Novel

Abstract: Most discussions of sentimental literature, taking their lead from Goldsmith's "Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy," center on matters of content and atmosphere-especially the prevalence of tears, whether those of the characters or the audience. But sentiment on stage is not equivalent to sentiment in the novel, nor can the most striking formal characteristics of the fiction being written in the 1760's and 1770's be illuminated by invocations of such philosophic doctrines as Shaftesbury's benevolism. Through a discussion of the form of sentimental fiction, I would like to suggest that such works as Tristram Shandy, The Man of Feeling, and The Sorrows of Young Werther were neither the resurgence of a cultural stream that had somehow gone underground for almost half a century, nor part of an essentially discontinuous novelistic tradition. They show instead both a structural and a thematic continuity with earlier eighteenthcentury novelists, and with the work of Pope and Swift, that is more central to the best of sentimental literature than any continuity with the themes, plot turns, and moral atmosphere of late seventeenthand early eighteenth-century drama. A convenient foil to my view is the frequent assertion, however qualified, that the form of the novel had become so established in the little more than twenty-five years between Pamela and Tristram Shandy that Sterne could already freely experiment with all the givens of the "well-made" novel, including its typographical conventions. In this literary-historical commonplace, formal balance and circumstantial realism are the assumed standards; sentiment, gothidsm, and Sterne are the deviations, to be explained more by reference to the history of ideas than the history of the novel. At best the change is explained as a "revolt against realism": the critic defines sub-genres and asks us to sit back and wait for Jane Austen. But I would like to argue that Sterne, among others, is not upending but extending the essential self-definition of the novel in England, and I would like to show how a literary form whose first appearance trailed banners of fidelity to real life and moral correctness could metamorphose into Sterne's elaborate formal games and the "discovered" manuscripts of Walpole and Mackenzie. Structure in the sentimental novel strives to imitate feeling rather than intellect, and to embody direct experience rather than artistic premeditation; this basic imperative of the novel from Defoe on is only made a little more apparent in the works of Sterne, Mackenzie, and others. The form of the sentimental novel, the gothic novel, and eighteenth-century fiction in general never seriously imitates such non-literary fictions as the order of providence, philosophic system, or social hierarchy, no matter how it may comment on them or include their patterns

"Frankenstein" and the Tradition of Realism

Abstract: The English novel, as a form, has rarely been kind to characters with large aspirations. For the most part, it has preferred to chastise them and to praise those heroes reconciled to unheroic lives. In a way, the limits of praiseworthy aspiration and of the capacity to act effectively on the world are established in Robinson Crusoe, which offers us a hero whose heroism consists in survival and learning to use the most ordinary materials to build a home and a thriving economy. That the story is, as a whole, incredible makes it all the more characteristic since its literary strategy is to make the unbelievable seem quite ordinary, and it uses extravagance not to create a hero with the kind of aspirations appropriate to romance, but with great expectations which go no further than getting rich. The conventions of realism, to which, by and large, the central traditions of the novel were moving by the nineteenth century, entail a preoccupation with ordinary materials so that, even in large historical dramas like those of Scott or in fictions, like Dickens's, where fantasy is allowed a much freer rein, the hero who aspires greatly is regarded with distrust, or gently mocked, or frustrated entirely. Most of the great novelists, from Scott and Jane Austen to Thackeray and George Eliot, tend to concern themselves with heroes and heroines whose major problems are not to affect the course of history or even to make a significant public difference, but to achieve, within the limits imposed by an extremely complicated and restrictive bourgeois society, a satisfactory modus vivendi. Only in gothic fiction can we find heroes whose ambitions-like Melmoth the Wanderer's-outstrip the limits of that society and are not unequivocally judged. Only there can we find directly and unprejudicially dealt with the large emotional energies which are impatient with the quotidian. Yet it is striking that the great nineteenth-century non-realistic fictions like Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights, or even lesser works like Melmoth the Wanderer and Uncle Silas, and certainly the romances of Scott, all tend to share certain attitudes toward heroism which we have hitherto too easily located in traditions of realism. Close examination of any of these works makes clear how inadequate the term realism is for any but the crudest sorts of notation, and how naturally "realistic" methods slip over into romance, or gothicism, or other non-realist categories. It is possible, I think, to take a work like Frankenstein and see it as representative of certain attitudes and techniques that become central to the realist tradition itself. As it works frankly in a world freed from some of the inhibiting restrictions of "belief" and "fact," it allows us to see at work quite openly some of the tensions

The Limits of Symbolic Realism: Problems of Empathic Field Observation in a Sectarian Context*

Abstract: Robert Bellah's "symbolic realism" is an epistemological orientation which asserts the existential "reality" of religious symbols without necessarily accepting their factual reality. It thus implies a common distinction between empathy, as the intuitive comprehension of subjects' meanings, and sympathy, as the internalization of these meanings. However, an approach which is empathic without being totally sympathic encounters special difficulties when applied to field observation of extreme sects such as the "Jesus Freaks," which define their own meanings as exclusively true and thus assume that to know the truth is necessarily to "believe." A participant observer who is perceived as empathic but who resists conversion thus implicitly threatens the sectarian meaning system and may disorient and demoralize subjects. The subjects' resulting defensive behavior may then disorient the researcher and inhibit further empathic communion. Rigidly exclusive sects may thus constitute a limiting case of symbolic realism, which may presuppose tolerance and pluralism.

Marx's Early Development: Vocation, Rebellion, and Realism

Abstract: truths are the most dangerous for the youth whose principles are not yet solid, whose conviction is not yet firm and unshakeable, though at the same time they seem to be the most lofty ones if they have taken root deep in the breast and if we can sacrifice life and all endeavors for the ideas which rule within them. They can make him happy who is called to them; but they destroy him who takes make overhurriedly, without reflection, obeying the moment. But the high opinion we have of the ideas on which our station in life is based lends to us a higher standpoint in society, enlarges our own dignity, makes our actions unwavering.'3 The theme of sacrifice which appears here-as it had earlier in connection with Marx's physical nature-also provided the concluding motif of the essay. Christian morality (which Marx seemed here to accept) "teaches us that the ideal for which we are all striving sacrificed itself for humanity." Thus "when we have chosen the vocation in which we can contribute most to humanity, burdens cannot bend us because they are only sacrifices for all."I4 Marx was drawn to the life of intellect as a life of sacrifice. The threads Marx wove together in his youthful essay-devotion to humanity, individual fulfillment and self-sacrifice, resistance to physical limitations, the conflict between ideal and material determinations of human life, the mixture of promise and threat in the intellectual vocation-would reappear throughout his life. It is true that some of these concerns can be classified as typical adolescent preoccupations; yet any attempt to deny their particular significance as signposts along the path of Marx's life must founder on their powerful presence in his later history. Great men build their lives around those fundamental human dilemmas which everyone must confront sometimes, but from which lesser men hasten to turn away. 13 Easton and Guddat, Writings, 38-39; Marx, Texte, IO. 14 Easton and Guddat, Writings, 39. For contrasts between Marx's view of choosing a vocation and some contemporary ones, see Heinz Monz, Karl Marx und Trier (Trier, 1964), I50. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.159 on Sat, 22 Oct 2016 04:41:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms MARX S EARLY DEVELOPMENT 481 Before we can follow Marx's essay on choosing a vocation forward into his later life, we must let it lead us in the opposite direction, back into his childhood. Marx himself gives us the signal to look there when he declares that "where our reason deserts us" in the search for a place in life, "Our heart calls upon our parents, who have already travelled life's path, who have tested the severity of fate."15 What would Marx find there? Or rather, to put the question properly, what had he been finding there as he grew into adolescence? Marx's father was a well-to-do lawyer and a well-known figure in Trier, but he was conscious of having had to make his own way in the world. Beginning life in comparatively meager economic circumstances, he had improved his station by hard work and by orienting his professional life away from the Jewish community, within which many of his ancestors had been rabbis, toward the larger, Christian community outside. His personal history reflected the growing assimilation of Jews into European society at the end of the eighteenth

Formal Patterns in The Iceman Cometh

Abstract: MOST CRITICS AGREE with Eugene O'Neill's estimation that his The Iceman Cometh is "among the few very best things I've ever done, I know." Some add that the success of his later plays is the result of earlier experimentation in expressionistic theatre and the subsequent integration of these experiments with a more autobiographical realism. Timo Tiusanen has reexamined the later plays in relation to the development of O'Neill's dramatic art: from his early naturalistic and expressionistic experiments to the "dynamic realism" of his later plays where unobtrusively "behind the surface of realism there is a purposeful patterning.” The subtle melding of symbolism and realism in a play like The Iceman has often been contrasted with the obvious, even "gratuitous and excessive" patterning in the "masks, asides, soliloquies, choruses, split characters and the like" of the earlier experimental plays. But, to my knowledge, there is no full study in English of the visual and aural "purposeful patterning" of The Icema...

Melodrama and Totality in "Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes"

Abstract: The plot of Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes has generally been viewed as something of a liability. Lanson saw it as an exemplary illustration of "l'ecoeurante extravagance des intrigues que combine lourdement la fantaisie de Balzac,"' and this has been a habitual response of criticism ever since ("excessively slick," "luridly sensational," "undeniably extravagant" are characteristic of the judgments offered by more recent critics). That the record should be virtually unanimous in its condemnation of the novel is, of course, readily understandable: the tissue of unexpected encounters, violent coincidences, abrupt reversals of fortune, multiple disguises which make up the plot of Splendeurs evidently suggest a cheap sensationalism and an exotic theatricality which speak of a fatal concession to the commercial, sub-literary mode of Eugene Sue (with whom Balzac was engaged in active rivalry during the 1840s). Yet it is arguable that the established critical consensus on the novel has missed a great deal. Such a suggestion should not however be taken as indicating that the customary description of the novel as "melodramatic" is somehow inappropriate or inadequate. The melodrama is central, and any attempt to develop a revaluation of the novel must start from the fact of that centrality; it dictates the essential terms on which the question of the exact literary status of Splendeurs must be decided. The case I wish to argue here, therefore, is not that the way to rescue Splendeurs from its damaging critical heritage is by asserting an artistic achievement located, as it were, outside Balzac's use of melodrama. On the contrary, what needs to be stressed is the wholeness of Splendeurs, its deep unity of vision and technique, involving above all a recognition that, in this novel, Balzac does work in and through the conventions of contemporary popular fiction, but that his achievement lies in the radical transformation of these conventions in the service of a serious and dignified artistic purpose. The focus of this transforming activity is in a particular type of relationship that Balzac, like Dickens (as we shall see, the meaningful comparison here is with Dickens and not with Sue), establishes between melodrama and realism. This is not the place to enter into the semantic jungle that has grown up around the intensely problematic category of literary "realism". Among the various approaches to this concept, there is however one, in relation to which the complex ramifications of the plot of Splendeurs prove to be of great significance. That approach, which has occupied a central and fruitful place in literary theory (and, in particular, in the work of Georg Lukacs and Raymond Williams) springs essentially

10. Les relations internationales au 18e siècle. Réflexions critiques et esquisse d'une méthodologie

Abstract: 10. Georges Livet : International relations in the 1 8th century. Critical reflections and outline of a methodology. ; Seen from the 20th Century, the study of international relations in the Century of the Enlightenment seems essential. It is the point in time when two key-powers in the modern world appeared on the scene : Russia and the United States. The emancipation of Latin America is equally being prepared. Yet it is in its specific importance that we must consider this Century, when maritim problems become extremely important and the outlines of future colonial empires are drawn. The notion of " foreign lands " becomes more precise and varied : Asia is everywhere present, if Africa remains absent. What did the Enlightenment bring with it in the domain of international relations ? Essentially a certain conception of man. " Men of all times " said Volney " are united by the same interests and the same pleasures Interests and pleasures including the spiritual kind, the common lot of a humanity whose natural state, for Kant as for Hobbes, was war since the state of peace could only be ushered in by a deliberate course of action. The real ordering of international relations remains to be undertaken. The contrast is striking between the cynical realism of certain and the declarations of intent or the a posteriori justifications which also constitute part of the arsenal of combat. In spite of the progress of knowledge, diplomatic organisation remains classic in style. However, a revision of values is outlined at the same time as new ideas come into being which will contribute, on account of their explosive dynamism, to giving a new face to international relations.

Women as Superfluous Characters in American Realism and Naturalism

Abstract: Radical feminist criticism at the present time attempts not merely the eradication of literary-critical expressions of male superiority, but goes further, tying attitudes of male ascendancy to bourgeois views and values and asserting the necessity to turn their attack against the bourgeois fabric of society. These critics begin with the Marxist assumption that the ideas of the dominant class become the ruling ideas of the entire society and extend their analysis of the contemporary role and position of women to an analysis of the culture in which values of market-place aggressiveness outrank values of any other kind. To quote Lillian Robinson:

How do Realism, Materialism and Dialectics fare in Contemporary Science?

Abstract: Our problem is to ascertain whether or not contemporary science lends any support to realism, materialism, and dialectics. Before embarking on an investigation of the performace of these three doctrines we shall sketch them, or rather certain versions of them. We shall then take a glimpse at their place in (a) the set of philosophical presuppositions of scientific research, (b) certain current research programs and (c) some results of research. The upshot of our investigation will be that contemporary science presupposes critical realism and supports a variety of materialism that may be called dynamical and pluralistic. On the other hand it does not confirm dialectics. We shall also make a plea for the elaboration and systematization of both critical realism and dynamical materialism, as well as for the adoption of a thoroughly critical and modern attitude in philosophical investigation.

Semantic and structural indeterminacy in the nigger of the " narcissus"': an experiment in reading

Abstract: IIn recent years critics have been provided with a number of new and significant intellectual tools which bolster their efforts to determine the abstract nature of a literary text and to respond to it adequately as interpreters of specific passages and works. The criterion of mimetic realism particularly has been assaulted and judged to be an unfortunate and misleading concept which has mistakenly been imposed upon artifacts that exist apart from such comforting epistemological assumptions. J. Hillis Miller has perhaps stated the problem most succinctly: One important aspect of current literary criticism is the disintegration of the paradigms of realism under the impact of structural linguistics and the renewal of rhetoric. If meaning in language rises not from the reference of signs to something outside words but from differential relations among the words themselves, if " referent " and " meaning " must always be distinguished, then the notion of a literary text which is validated by its one-to-one correspondence to some social, historical, or psychological reality can no longer be taken for granted.1

Return to man: Jacques Copeau and the actor

Abstract: In the first two decades of this century the schism in France between Romanticism and Realism divided theatre artists into two mutually exclusive camps. Jacques Copeau sought to mediate this struggle not only by combining the best of both “isms”; into a cohesive theatrical style, but by basing that style in a rediscovery of man as the single essential in theatre, both as subject (content) and as medium (form).