Showing papers on "Realism published in 1974"

The Presence of the Future: The Eschatology of Biblical Realism

Abstract: After surveying the debate of eschatology, Ladd discusses the promise of the kingdom, the fulfillment of the promise, and the consummation of the promise. Throughout the book he develops his thesis that the kingdom of God involves two great movements--fulfillment within history and consummation at the end of history. "

Contemporary Thought and Politics

Abstract: Gellner's political philosophy in these volumes combines the down-to-earth realism of political sociology with a rational treatment of the normative issues of traditional political thought. In these essays Gellner strives to understand the religions of nationalism, communism and democracy, returning again and again to the basic values of the liberal: social tolerance, rational criticism, human decency and justice.

The Scribbling Women and the Cosmic Success Story

Abstract: This essay deals with American fiction between the early 1850s, when Hawthorne and Melville produced their best work, and the first novels of Howells and James in the early 1870s. The familiar notion that this was the period of transition from pre-Civil War Romanticism to postwar Realism tells us nothing in particular about it. Yet we need some historical frame in which to place both the later efforts of Hawthorne and Melville and the apprentice work of the next generation of novelists. To this end, I propose to examine a few examples of the popular fiction that held at least quantitative dominance of the field. Hawthorne and Melville believed that the unprecedented sales of a new kind of stories by women writers contributed significantly to the loss of audience they both suffered in the early 1850s; and not only Howells and James but also Mark Twain showed in their early careers an unacknowledged attraction toward the procedures of the popular novelists along with a conscious effort to escape from them.

Marxism and Art in the Era of Stalin and Hitler: A Comparison of Brecht and Lukacs

Abstract: ion which favored Nazi ability to hide the real world. What was needed, instead of talk about defending "culture," was a literature of plainspeaking realism. This Brecht attempted to present in works such as Schweik in the Second World War, whose "idiotic" little "hero" subverts, out of practical opportunism, the heroic poses of those in power. If culture is to be defended, Brecht argued further, it needs to be seen in relation to the entire productive activity of the masses.126 The experience of Nazism heightened Brecht's desire for a realist literature which would reveal a material reality hidden by official culture. In this art no period or literary style had a monopoly. Explicitly countering Lukics, Brecht defended modernist experiment where it had exposed a reality opaque to everyday "experience," and cited Nazi manipulation of language and visual image as the real formalism. His suspicion of the aesthetics of catharsis had been accentuated by an observation of Nazi theatricality, the deliberate Wagnerian construction of an illusionary reality with which spectators would passionately identify.127 His sharp rejection of a vicariously fulfilling emotionality and insistence upon critical observation and intelligence, moreover, was closely connected with an awareness of the manipulated psycho-drama of Nazi political culture.128 To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, Brecht's politicizing of art intended to challenge the aestheticized politics of the Nazis.129 Like LukAcs after 1928 and official Communist policy after 1934, he too favored a popular front against Nazism. Whereas the former sought upper middle class liberal allies with the working classes, thus accentuating the classical patrician strand of the literary heritage, Brecht implicitly worked for a united front of workers, the lower middle classes, peasants, and the alienated intelligentsia against the economic and political elites, either old or new. His hope for a popular front of SPD and KPD against the Nazis, which Stalin had effectively opposed in the critical years 1930-33, had been for a common effort of rank and file workers more than for alliances of parliamentarians, trade union bureaucrats and communist officials.3 126. Ibid., p. 249. 127. Brecht, GW, 18, p. 132; Schriften zum Theater, 5 (Frankfurt am Main, 1963-64), pp. 92-94. For an excellent discussion and illustration of this aspect of Nazi culture see Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, 1960), pp. 300-303, where the Nazi film Triumph des Willens is analyzed. 128. Ewen, pp. 217-218. 129. The formulation is used in Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," p. 242. 130. Fritz Sternberg, Der Dichter und die Ratio, pp. 26-27. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.157 on Tue, 17 May 2016 05:47:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms MARXISM AND AR T IN THE ERA OF STALIN AND HITLER 41 Progress as Faith or as Project In their responses to Stalinism and Nazism, Brecht and Luk ics revealed strikingly different views of the modem historical process. Laboring under the strain of his own extremely pessimistic view of western society and culture before and during World War I, LukAcs moved in the 1920s and f930s toward its compensatory, opposite pole--a sanitized view of history as inevitable stages of progress. His portrayal of Nazism as "barbaric" and "decadent" denuded contemporary history of its real contradictions and terrors and set "heroic" Soviet "progress" in a single contrasting positive light. The latter would bypass the "decay" and "sickness" of advanced capitalist society and continue the progressive culture of an earlier bourgeois humanism. In a manner very similar to Stalinist polemics, LukAcs' positivistic and deterministic view of history allowed him to view modern western art (such as expressionism), as "objectively" reactionary. For one who had contrived to believe in a closed historical process of progressive stages known in advance, western modernist pessimism was to be repressed in favor of the implicitly progressive perspectives found in a Balzac or Goethe, or the "enthusiastic certainty of victory" which the critic found in Gorkij31 What Lukacs demanded of literature, in effect, and what Kafka, Joyce and Toller did not provide, was a continuous reassurance that this road to progress was inevitably proceeding in spite of capitalist "decay," world war and fascism (and often in spite of the author's own political sympathies). His adoption of an Hegelian teleology of history's "cunning" and imminent rationality as well as his passive aesthetics of reflection are to be seen in this light: if art helps to convince one, through a positive resolution of contradictions, of inexorable progress toward human fulfillment, then there remains little urgency to intervene actively for its

Reinhold Niebuhr's Critique of Pacifism

Abstract: Most of the recent attempts to demonstrate the poverty of liberalism and political realism have accepted the realist interpretation of violence with few reservations. For example, few political theologians, theologians of hope, and theologians of revolution have reconsidered or modified this component of the realist perspective even as they have tried to dismantle realism. It is now time to splash what Holmes called “cynical acid” on this assumed orthodoxy, especially but not only in Protestantism. The pacifist perspective on war and violence deserves a hearing which this stacked jury of realists and their critics have refused to grant. This refusal results in part from Reinhold Niebuhr's critique of pacifism, widely considered even by pacifists to be trenchant and compelling.

Reid's Realism

Abstract: THOMAS REID'S Essays on the Intellectual Powers oJ Man was first published in 1785. In it Reid presented a revised and refined version of the analysis of perception and defense of perceptual knowledge first stated in his Inquiry into the Human Mind of 1764. His position on perception is in many ways the keystone of Reid's philosophy, and one aspect of it, his rejection of the Way of Ideas, is that for which he is best known. Reid maintained that the chief lesson taught by the history of philosophy is that to accept the doctrine of ideas is to court results which only serve to discredit philosophy, x His account of the history of the doctrine may be summarized as follows: every major philosopher f rom Plato to H u m e held that, strictly speaking, sensory ideas are the only objects of perceptionY This position seemed innocent enough to most ancient and medieval philosophers, who either ignored the issue of perceptual knowledge or uncritically assumed that sensory ideas are the effects and replicas of material things. 3 Realizing that this assumption, even when carefully qualified, is by no means self-evident, Descartes made a circuitous, obscure at tempt to prove the existence of the material world. T o it Locke added a clear but feeble attempt. 4 The arguments and results of Malebranche, Berkeley and H u m e made it obvious that, because no such proofs can succeed, the doctrine of sensory ideas must beget either idealism or scepticism. 5 Reid embraced neither; instead, he rejected their source. He insisted upon the need to justify a doctrine so big with bizarre consequences and held that the available evidence is not sufficient to do so. We do not know by sense experience that ideas exist. 6 One is not required to postulate them in order to solve puzzles about perception, since doing so generates parallel puzzles about ideasY

In Quest of Unity: A Study of Failure and Redemption in All's Well That Ends Well

Abstract: HERE have been many attempts to explain the disparity of critical opinions about All's Well That Ends Well and the discontent critics have felt with the play. Perhaps the most convincing of these focus on problems arising from the uneasy conjunction of realism and romance. G. K. Hunter lucidly analyzes the complications that prevent a simple romantic response to the play: "Critical realism accompanies fairy-tale, satire shadows spirituality, complex moral perceptions deny us a simplicity of approach, complex intellectual interests demand an analytical and detached attitude to the characters."' And, following up Hunter's argument, James L. Calderwood2 shrewdly observes that the disparity between the two worlds of the play, the romantic and the realistic, has produced a similar disparity of critical interpretation. Criticism, faced with complications arising from the juxtaposition in the play of "extreme romantic conventions with down-to-earth and critical realism"3 and the the quasi-allegorical and the symbolic with the sceptical and the practical, normally retreats into the simplicity of "either-or" interpretations. Some critics feel that the play's symbolic unity is strong enough to override the destructive tendencies of scepticism and of parody;4 others are dismayed at the disintegrating effect these tendencies have on the play as symbolic romance and are obliged to declare it a failure.5 In Calderwood's view, this disparity of critical interpretations, which corresponds to the contrary pulls to realism and romance within the play itself, is most immediately observed in contrary responses to Helena. This may well be because the central problem of interpretation is, as Hunter argues, "to fit Helena into the play or adapt the play to Helena" (p. xlviii). Critics treating the play realistically, Calderwood notes, find Helena "an unscrupulous, hard-eyed huntress with her sights on the quarry and her mind on the make," whereas those

Realism, Radicalism, and Eschatology in Reinhold Niebuhr: A Reassessment

Abstract: Ours is a time of shifting vogues of thought. The themes that stir excitement soon become targets of criticism, or, worse, turn simply passe. Intellectual heroes come and go quickly. In such a milieu it is not surprising that criticism often goes full circle: people and ideas are acclaimed, rejected, and rediscovered in breathless haste. No wonder, then, that Reinhold Niebuhr means different things to different people. Some, deeply disaffected with American society and skeptical that this nation can solve its moral and political problems, respond to Niebuhr as the semi-Marxist and the polemical critic of "liberalism." Others, living through the quick rise and fall of the recent New Left, see in Niebuhr the "tamed cynic" and the critic of romanticism in politics. The reassessment of Niebuhr cannot be a static enterprise. A thinker always on the move, he continuously responded to criticisms, including his own trenchant self-criticisms. To evaluate his ideas in his presence was always to enter into dialogue with him, awaiting the next reply. His thought was vibrant enough that the dialogue will continue, in the sense that dialogue often continues with thinkers of the past. This essay is a contribution to such dialogue. It centers on familiar themes in the political thought and theology of Niebuhr: on utopianism and realism, on radicalism and pragmatism, on eschatalogy and political activity.

The Demystification of Style: Metaphoric and Metonymic Language in A Modern Instance

Abstract: T, HE MODE OF WRITING which we call literary realism has been variously described as representational or mimetic,' as "common" in the sense of "average, ordinary, normal, democratic,"2 as opposed to the idealism of the romantic fiction that preceded it, as highly detailed, socially committed, a record of the surface of things. Its verisimilitude is often stressed. It is positivistic, psychological, and empirical. All this is true. We can assume that realism sets up a historical context to whose coherence and density it is dedicated. Unlike romanticism, which aims to transcend the limits of phenomenal experience, realism locates itself in the midst of sensory evidence and iepudiates or ignores whatever lies beyond sensory perception. But realism is language as well as attitude, and we ought therefore to understand it as an epistemological act, especially since it is, in large measure, a stylistic reaction against a literature which attempted to discover the invisible presence of spiritual reality and to incarnate it in language. One of the favorite devices of the realist novel, in fact, was the interpretation and deconstruction of the romantic ontology. "The Turn of the Screw," for example, or The

English Realism: George Eliot and the Pre-Raphaelites

Abstract: W hen Ruskin wrote to The Times in 1851 defending the young PreRaphaelites, he rebutted the charge of archaism in their art, and argued that their intention was 'to surrender no advantage which the knowledge or inventions of the present time [could] afford'.1 In thus linking the PreRaphaelite claim to naturalistic accuracy with the great contemporary expansion of knowledge in the modern world, Ruskin located the principal, and probably the most controversial innovation which the Brotherhood made. This was to insist that painting had wider cultural affinities than existed within the bounds of its own separate history. As an empirical discipline it was connected with efforts to understand the physical and spiritual structure of the world, and it must be judged by the quality of its insight, and its methodological rigour, rather than by the 'conventional rules of picturemaking'.2 The rejection of such conventional rules can be shown to have existed at least in the previous generation among romantic art critics, but in the intervening years the intellectual climate of England had changed decisively, and in the late 1840's the serious advocacy of humble, naturalistic study as the basis of art was a polemical contribution to a specific contemporary debate. In this context the Pre-Raphaelites became realists, arguing like all realists that art should present an image of reality, and should engage with the preoccupations of modern day-to-day life. Holman Hunt recorded that in the long discussions held by the group in its early days,

George Eliot's Ecumenical Jew, or, The Novel as Outdoor Temple

Abstract: Henry James asked rhetorically of Middlemarch: "If we write novels so, how shall we write History?"1 In her last novel, George Eliot took the historical model of Middlemarch one step further into the vatic or prophetic. Middlemarch had reached beyond "realism" into a highly articulated symbolic structure of what U. C. Knoepflmacher terms a "new reality" "fusing fact and myth."2 In Daniel Deronda George Eliot extended the meaning of myth into "Utopian pictures." In a sense, attempting to summarize the history of the Western world and adumbrate its future, showing how "processes . . . have been repeated again and again," she had reverted to the rather abstract formulation of her first novel, Scenes of Clerical Life.3 Deronda, to be sure, is no Amos Barton or Mr. Gilfil, but, as each of these characters had been created from a dogmatic standpoint, so also Deronda (as critics never tire of telling us) is as much a mouthpiece as dramatic character. James again observed acutely that George Eliot proceeds "from the abstract to the concrete," 4 and most critics agree that Deronda is inconcrete to the point of vapidity. Few of these critics have come up with suggestions as to why Eliot created Deronda the way she did.5 I would like to make a few tentative suggestions, and I'd like to begin with the idea that in Daniel Deronda Eliot's emotional life comes full circle. Its Evangelical origins are transformed into an attempted affirmative consummation of all her aspirations and hopes for mankind. In Daniel Deronda she tried to pull together the parts of a world that had been shattered when she lost her faith in transcendentalism, a loss that forced the burden of meaning on the individual mundane consciousness. George Eliot had never really reconciled herself to that loss, any more than she had reconciled herself to her original sin of disobeying her father and alienating her brother. Kierkegaard's roughly contemporary solution to the same problem of alienation was to elevate the absurd and the paradox against despair. Feuerbach's new form of secular religion, however, was more congenial to George Eliot's conservative-reforming intellect. And yet Kierkegaard can help us understand Deronda. In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard says that "the ethical as such is

The "Good New" and the "Bad New": Metamorphoses of the Modernism Debate in the GDR since 1956

Abstract: art, in order to get rid of the methods of socialist realism. In reality the call for 'abstract realism' is nothing more than an expression of ideological coexistence."33 By rejecting all "modernistic" tendencies, 26. Kurella later returned to the same topic. See "Die historische Leistung der entfremdeten Arbeit," Sinn und Form (1968), 466-499. 27. See Hans Koch, "Fainf Jahre nach Bitterfeld (1964)," Dokumente, pp. 945 ff. or Klaus Jarmatz, "Kunst oder Surrogat?" Sinn und Form (1969), 668-689. 28. See Ernst Fischer, Kunst und Koexistenz (Reinbek, 1966). 29. See Dokumente, p. 814. 30. ND, March 30, 1963. 31. Einheit, 3 (1963). 32. ND, April 4, 1963. 33. Walter Ulbricht, "Ueber die Entwicklung einer volksverbundenen sozialistischen Nationalkultur," Dokumente, p. 980. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.27 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 06:30:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 80 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE Ulbricht sought to advocate a literature whose themes would be drawn from the contemporary industrial milieu of the GDR, but in matters of form would rely upon the masters of the "classical heritage" and upon critical realism d la Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Arnold Zweig, Lion Feuchtwanger and other such authors. The course thus charted received its final codification at the Eleventh Plenum of the Central Committee of the SED in December of 1965, when "modernistic" non-conformists such as Stefan Heym, Manfred Bieler, Peter Hacks, Heiner Milller and especially Wolf Biermann and Robert Havemann, almost all of whom had published in the West, were castigated as traitors or parasites.34 After this sweeping ostracism GDR writers tended to concentrate almost exclusively on domestic problems. Whereas previously there had been talk of "international achievement," of Weltniveau, now the phrase "love of homeland" was frequently heard.35 In the end, the art of the GDR was to become "patriotic" and to strive for "a separate and unique character in form and content," instead of making "constant ideological concessions to pressures from the West."36 West German literature thus largely disappeared from the cultural scene. Until 1965 such authors as Bll, Frisch, Weiss, Walser, Enzensberger, Gerd Semmer, Christian Geissler, Arnfried Astel and other western writers had received almost continuous attention in Neue Deutsche Literatur. In fact, as recently as November 1965, Abusch had praised Walser, Weiss and Ball in this periodical as the best "humanistic writers" of the FRG.37 All this suddenly ceased. From 1966 to 1971, the last phase of Ulbricht's regime, there was hardly any mention of West German literature in the leading literary journals. No one even troubled to make condemnations. More than anything there was a noticeable congratulatory tone in Neue Deutsche Literatur during this period. Birthdays were announced, anniversaries of the Republic were celebrated and proud assessments of the development towards "the socialist community of people" and the "educated nation" were made. Not surprisingly such elimination of outside influences led to "internalization" and withdrawal into the self. In 1967 Klaus Gysi even proposed that the "education of emotions" was one of the most important tasks of the new literature.38 To be sure, when Rainer Kunze and 34. See Jost Hermand, "Biermanns Dilemma," Basis, 4 (1974), 175-191. 35. Hans Koch, NDL, 1 (1967), 12. 36. Alexander Abusch, Einheit, 4/5 (1967). 37. See NDL, 11 (1965), xiii. 38. See NDL, 1 (1967), 71. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.27 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 06:30:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms METAMORPHOSES IN THE MODERNISM DEBATE 81 Christa Wolf actually followed this suggestion to its logical conclusion by introducing a new spontaneity and subjectivism, there was once again an immediate call for partisanship and concern for popular common interests. There was even a revival of the discussion of 1961 concerning "genuine" and "non-genuine" literature, in order to reinforce the concept of a literature of common relevance concentrating on the "path from the I to the We." Nevertheless, during this time of self-searching there was no way of avoiding the production of lyric poetry which inevitably had a marked personal tone. At the same time, a new interest in expressionism arose with an emphasis on the personal and lyrical. To support this shift in interest, Klaus Kaindler, Werner Mittenzwei and Hans Kaufmann revived the so-called "transition period theory,"39 while Silvia Schlenstedt emphasized the importance of "humanistic" values in expressionist lyrics.40 In this sphere, at least, a backdoor was opened for "modernism." But even in these years complete insulation against international developments was impossible. While Party theoreticians paid particular attention to developments inside the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, hardly a word about these matters appeared in the daily press. Only after the Eastern Bloc countries had intervened were these occurrences publicly discussed. For example, in his speech before the Ninth Plenum of the Central Committee in October 1968, Karl Kayser stated that in view of the situation in Czechoslovakia, the strict separation from the West and the decisions reached at the Eleventh Plenum of 1965 seemed completely justified.41 The interest in Kafka, the performance of dramas from the theater of the absurd, the works of Havel and Kohout, the momentum towards "modernistic" art and corresponding undermining of humanistic values: all of this was blamed for the swing to the right in Czechoslovakia in the eyes of Party theoreticians. However, as previously mentioned, this was not aired in public in order to avoid any undue stir at home. There was a similar reticence in the GDR about the influence of the "New Left" in West German literature. If the "New Left" was mentioned at all, its proponents were labeled harmless "nonconformists." Their "anti-authoritarian gesture of refusal" was regarded as a new version of expressionism inspired by old "expressionists" such as Bloch and Marcuse.42 It was said 39. See Werner Mittenzwei's foreword to the new edition of Menschheitsdammerung (1968), Walter Kaufmann's Krisen und Wandlungen der deutschen Literatur von Wedekind bis Feuchtwanger (1969) and Klaus Kandler's Drama und Klassenkampf (1970). 40. Silvia Schlenstedt, Afterword in Expressionismus Lyrik (Berlin, 1969), pp. 617-658. 41. See Dokumente, pp. 1413-1415. 42. Reinhard Weisbach, Wir und der Expressionismus (Berlin, 1972), pp. 34f. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.27 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 06:30:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 82 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE that, instead of contributing to the critique of economic and political developments, concern in these circles was restricted primarily to the critique of culture. According to Hermann Kaihler, the leadership to which the arrogant intelligentsia aspired was, in the last analysis, reducible to a "solidly old-fashioned bourgeois elitism."43 Others regarded this pop revolt as simply an offshoot of the more general sex craze in the western world. No one confronts any external enemies, it was said. Every individual sees the enemy to be conquered only within the self, in personal complexes and hang-ups. In the eyes of GDR critics, these are not rebels but loners trapped in the jungle of capitalism, decked out in colorful garb and hypnotized by various exotic drugs. Furthermore, it was argued that this psycho-biological world view offers no hope for social revolution, but represents a parasitic bourgeois longing for "absolute" freedom, or more accurately--licence. The only development praised in this latest mood in the West is the direction taken by Walser, Wallraff, the "work-groups" and the German Communist Party. Only in one sphere did the ideological argument with the West become philosophical and theoretical: the debate arising in 1968 concerning the convergence theory.44 This theory was defined as "revisionist," since it suggested that because of increasing "socialization" in the West and increasing "liberalization" in the East, the paths of socialist and capitalist countries would necessarily converge and eventually become identical. In the GDR the motivation for this kind of thinking was seen as an effort to deny ideological differences and was taken as a blatant anti-communist effort indirectly in support of American imperialism. In his speech at the Seventh German Congress on Culture in April of 1968, Alexander Abusch dismissed the convergence theory as purely "mechanistic."45 Similar assertions can be found by Erna Heckel46 and Klaus Gysi.47 The sharpest attack was made in the following year by Klaus Jarmatz in Sinn und Form. In his opinion, humanistic values are obviously deteriorating under capitalism, while in socialism they are becoming more firmly and widely established. Therefore Jarmatz sees an intentional deception in the phrase 43. Hermann KAhler, "Aesthetik und Gewalt-Protest als Happening?" Sinn und Form (1971), 703. 44. See Jutta Kneissel, "The Convergence Theory,"New German Critique, 2 (1974), 16-27. 45. See Sonntag, April 21, 1968. 46. See ND, August 18, 1968. 47. See ND, October 19, 1968. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.27 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 06:30:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms METAMORPHOSES IN THE MODERNISM DEBATE 83 "one world culture."48 He advised that the clearly opposing fronts be singled out and hard-line decisions be made.

Professor Quine and real classes.

Abstract: Symbolic logic was committed by its founders to the theory of real classes, but nominalism, which at the time prevailed in other philosophical enterprises, soon reasserted itself in logic. The result was that the theory of real classes was difficult to maintain. This difficulty is best exemplified by the work of Professor Quine, and I propose to show it. Quine early on had the advantage of study with Whitehead, the realist, but it was not easy for a thinker trained in the tradition of nominalism to hold to the recognition of the reality of classes, since such a concept is the very contradictory of the nominalistic notion of their unreality. Frege had signalled a change from the nominalistic tradition in a return to realism, but Russell and Whitehead working together had difficulty in holding to it. Professor Quine’s early work therefore is nominalistic despite the influence on him of the realism of his teacher, Whitehead.

The sources and nature of Adolf Hitler's techniques of persuasion

Abstract: Although Hitler relied on adaptations of the persuasive techniques of Catholics, Communists, Freemasons, Fascists, and the political propagandists of some democracies, he extended these techniques beyond ritualistic realism.

Industrialism and class consciousness in the novels of D. H. Lawrence: a study in realism

Abstract: Unlike other areas of sociology, the sociological study of literature has remained in a limbo between social science as simply the study of facts, and literature as an area which by its very nature cannot be scientifically analysed. This thesis is an attempt to bridge the gap between these two poles. We begin by discussing the idea of literature as a social phenomenon, looking in particular at the work of Marx, Engels, George Lukacs and Lucien Goldmann, whilst at the same time pin-pointing various methodological problems. We end the first part by drawing together various elements from each writer, such as, 'world-view', 'mediation', and 'realism', including the more literary orientated work of Rene Girard, in an attempt to devise a method which is scientific but is also capable of discussing the text and aesthetic features of a novel in detail. In the second chapter we look at intellectual influences which Lawrence was subject to, and also his own personal philosophy as expressed in his essays and letters. In the third chapter, we examine the economic and political forces which were operating in England at the time he was writing, and try to relate these, and the elements discussed in the previous chapter, to the structure of his novels. In the last chapter we discuss the novels themselves by using our methodology arrived at in chapter one. In this way we are able to examine the novels both generally, and in depth, and arrive at a conclusion which confirms the subjective analyses of literary critics such as F.R. Leavis, but provides a scientific basis for the judgement of literature as aesthetically good or bad. It is expected that this method can be applied to other writers, and therefore says something about the novel as a genre and not merely one particular writer.