Showing papers on "Realism published in 1976"

Problems from Locke

Abstract: J. L. Mackie selects for critical discussion six related topics which are prominent in John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding: the distinction between primary and secondary qualities; representative theories of perception; substance, real essence, and nominal essence; abstract ideas, universals, and the meaning of general terms; identity, especially personal identity; and the conflict between empiricism and the doctrine of innate ideas. He examines Locke's arguments carefully, but his chief interest is in the problems themselves, which are important for our attempt to decide what sort of world we live in and how we can defend our claim to know about it. The book shows that on most of these topics, views close to Locke's are more defensible than has commonly been supposed, but that there is nonetheless a tension in Locke's thought between extreme empiricism and common-sense or scientific realism. Whereas Locke's immediate successors, Berkeley and Hume, and many later thinkers, have stressed the empiricism at the expense of the realism, this book argues against the more extreme empiricist doctrines but supports the more moderate ones, especially the claims that innate ideas cannot be a source of necessary truth and that authoritative, autonomous knowledge of synthetic truths requires empirical support. The position J. L. Mackie advocates thus reconciles realism with moderate empiricism.

Symbolism and intellectual realism in children's drawings

Abstract: Summary. Various distinctions which have been applied to the development of children's drawings are considered critically, and a distinction between symbolism and intellectual realism is suggested. Drawings made by 42 5- to 7-year-old children of familiar objects with distinctive characteristics were examined. Results provided support for the suggested symbolic or generic character of much children's drawing.

Realism and Theatricalism in A Streetcar Named Desire

Abstract: ON THE MORNING after the premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, Joseph Wood Krutch commented: "This may be the great American play." From the perspective of more than a quarter of a century later A Streetcar Named Desire appears to be one of the great American plays. Its greatness lies in Tennessee Williams' matching of form to content. In order to gain sympathy for a character who is in the process of an emotional breakdown, Williams depicts the character from without and within; both the objectivity and the subjectivity of Blanche are present to the audience. In A Streetcar Named Desire Williams synthesizes depth characterization, typical of drama that strives to be an illusion of reality, with symbolic theatrics, which imply an acceptance of the stage as artifice. In short, realism and theatricalism, often viewed as stage rivals, complement each other in this play. Throughout the 1940s Williams attempted to combine elements of theatricalist staging with verisimilitudinous plots and characters. H...

Pop Art: A Reactionary Realism

Abstract: In parody the implication is the perverse, and I feel that in my own work I don't mean it to be that. Because I don't dislike the work that I'm parodying…. The things that I have parodied I actually admire.— Roy LichtensteinLawrence Alloway writes that “Pop art is neither abstract nor realistic, though it has contacts in both directions.”1 This article explores its contacts in the realistic direction, even taking it as a political articulation. Jean Cassou insists that “a realistic movement in art is always revolutionary.”

The Dialectics of Realism and Idealism in Modern Historiographic Theory

Abstract: Modern historiographic theory centers on praxis and is marked by a concern to evolve an epistemological methodology of history, as distinguished from a pure epistemology of history.' This concern reflects the origins of modern theoretical historiography. Though not usually discussed within a given historical work, historiographic theory has often been the outgrowth of the attention practicing professional historians have paid to the problematic character of their craft the locus and components of its "werld," its modes of description, its verbal medium, and its assumptions about the nature of its truth. A concomitant of modern man's acute historical consciousness, modern historiographic theory, which had arisen in the middle of the eighteenth century, began in the early nineteenth century to give deliberate, though not always sophisticated, consideration to these factors. This consideration was primarily the result of the developing dialogue between two tendencies already implicit in the early tenets of historicism historiographic realism, which gained an early ascendancy and soon became the accepted fornm-liation, and historiographic idealism, which, though sharing a common origin with realism, differentiated itself largely in reaction to it. As modern historiographic theory matured toward the beginning of the twentieth century, the positions of realism and idealism became more explicit and the problematic nature of their concerns more pronounced. In the twentieth century the continuation of the internal dialogue between realism and idealism within historiographic theory takes the form of a series of efforts, often quite deliberate, to accommodate and reconcile the views of one school to those of the other. The history of modern historiographic theory thus displays the pattern, roughly, of a circle common origin, differentiation, attempted reconciliation. What is most striking and interesting about this history is the extent to

Graphic Representation: From Intellectual Realism to Visual Realism in Draw-a-House-Tree Task.

Abstract: KALYAN-MASIH, VIOLET. Graphic Representation: From Intellectual Realism to Visual Realism in Drawa-House-Tree Task. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1976, 47, 1026-1031. In a pilot study of childen's drawings of "a house with a tree behind it," the Luquet-Piaget sequence-scribbling, fortuitous realism, failed realism, intellectual realism, and visual realism-was tentatively supported. Several strategies in decentering from intellectual to visual realism were also noted. This study was undertaken to investigate (a) the findings of the exploratory study, (b) the relationship of house-tree task with selected Piagetian and two psychometric measures, and (c) synchronous development among these measures. Data from 98 white middle-class Ss, age 39-78 months, were used for analysis. The Luquet-Piaget developmental sequence for house-tree task, the use of strategies, and the relationship among these measures were confirmed. Some support for synchronous development was also found, but longitudinal studies can provide more conclusive evidence. The house-tree task, because of its simplicity, ease, and economy in administering and scoring, has potential for assessing the cognitive development of younger children.

Olive Schreiner: Child of Queen Victoria stories, dreams and allegories

Abstract: Literature may be seen as significant fiction, "an imaginary presentation with meaningful relation to the real world",1 or as a "heterocosm, another world related to the real world by analogy" (Hough, p. 44). In this world of significant analogical structures, allegory has a special place. It is the mode "in which the exploitation of two layers of meaning becomes a formal constituent of the work" (Hough, p. 121). Its opposite is not symbolism, as symbols are often static visual components of its dynamic narrative structure, but realism, or mimesis, an imitation of the real world in which the sensuous level of particular lives is realized with detailed and often historical accuracy. "Allegory is the clearest instance (not the richest and most profound, but the clearest) of the dialectic between immaterial conception and sensuous realization of which the life of literature is made up" (Hough, p. 127). The difference between mimesis and allegory can be usefully illustrated by putting Middlemarch and The Story of an African Farm side by side; they were written in the same decade of the nineteenth century. Both works split a protagonist into a male and female aspect: for Lydgate and Dorothea read Waldo and Lyndall. Both express the failure to reach ideal aspirations: Lydgate and Dorothea compromise with harsh realities; Waldo and Lyndall die young. The difference between the works is one of literary mode: Middlemarch takes the English realistic, historical novel to a summit of detailed plenitude: the "heterocosm" of Middlemarch is tied by a million strings to the historical world of a given period. The Story of an African Farm is set in a world both timeless and phantasmagoric, and Schreiner 's Preface to the second edition makes it clear that the rules of the realistic novel will not fit her book: she distinguishes between the "stage" method where characters and crises appear in the right place and time and her own method, where "nothing can be prophesied."2 "When the crisis comes the man who would fit it does not return. When the curtain falls no-one is ready" (Schreiner, African Farm, p. 7). "Life may be painted to either method; but the methods are different. The canons of criticism that bear upon the one cut cruelly upon the other" (Schreiner, African Farm, p. 7). The defence of her method looks forward to Virginia Woolf's famous defence of her artistic procedure in rendering the random impressionism of life, and to D.H. Lawrence's talk of dissolving the old stable ego of character, just as her shifting dream-like landscape looks back to Spenser and sunyan. Olive Schreiner's fictions, both short and long, can best be understood as modern allegories, as extended narrative metaphors for the soul's timeless quest for the truth, but modified by the particular dilemma of the nineteenth-century soul, which needed to move out of the confining guilts of a punitive theology to the freer air of a new

Toward a Marxist Theory of Aesthetics: The Development of Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union

Abstract: Socialist realism, celebrated since 1934 by Soviet officials and party critics as the artistic expression of the proletarian revolution and as the most vivid, profound, and heroic cultural development since the Renaissance, is generally greeted by Western critics with bemusement or open hostility. The central characteristics of socialist realism, its steadfastly optimistic and frankly tendentious approach to human experience, its identification of aesthetic worth with ideological "correctness," and its enforced harmony of aesthetic expression with current party policies seem to many non-Soviet observers to suggest instead the restriction willy-nilly of human knowledge and perception within the field of art. There is strong evidence, moreover, to suspect that the theory of socialist realism fundamentally corrupts a genuinely Marxist approach to cultural activity. This essay discusses the theory of socialist realism as it relates to literature and is organized along the following lines: first, socialist realism must be interpreted within the broad philosophical framework of Marxism, a tradition to which it affects loyalty and claims lineage. Second, socialist realism must be related to the various and opposing interpretations of Marxism which flourished in the stormy period of literary debate in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. The discussion focuses on a few prominent individuals who most extended and expressed each side of the dispute regarding the nature and function of literature and who proved to be the most influential, politically, personally, or theoretically, to the development and resolution of that debate. Third, socialist realism must be understood as in part a product of the social and economic developments of the decade, and as an artistic theory that crystallized in the early 1930s

On realism in programming examples

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Objectivity and Low Seriousness in American Naturalism

Abstract: Resistance toward accepting realism and naturalism as major literary terms is lively and will undoubtedly stay so Though nobody seriously denies that a naturalistic mind or intellectual system had matured by 1900, some insist that realism and naturalism, grounded in the literal and leaning toward the positivistic, are antithetical, to artistic creation or else irrelevant to its unique qualities Such a view has helped to refine the debate over theory, which recently elicited the brilliant opening chapter of Edwin H Cady's The Light of Common Day (1971) Of course, this debate is ultimately worthwhile so far as it helps us appreciate specific novels Only the zealot needs to decide what is the most honorific mode of fiction or to deny that experience radiates inward and outward into both private and social realms—between which different readers and different sides of the same reader will make varying degrees of choice The private realm may express itself best in symbols, impressionism, or fantasy, but the world that we fitfully share and that is partly the product, as well as a determinant, of our inwardness attracts some novelists toward mimesis I unabashedly believe that mimesis serves humanistic ends in trying to cope with the outward world and bring it into perspective against the inward and that it fights through to becoming an invaluable mode of discourse

The U.S. in the U.S.S.R.: American Literature through the Filter of Recent Soviet Publishing and Criticism

Abstract: A curious inconsistency marks the prevailing Soviet view of the appropriate relationship between literature and reality. On the one hand, future-oriented Soviet writing of Socialist Realism projects into its portrayals of the present communist dreams, visions, and aspirations, anachronistically distorting in the process descriptions not only of contemporary realia but also, more importantly, of human behavior and values. As for writing of non-Soviet origin, it may be said that no other country with a Western culture has a population as thoroughly indoctrinated in the belief that literature is-or at least should be-a faithful mirror of life

Mind, It Does Matter

Abstract: The title of this paper, ‘Mind, It Does Matter,’ is a variant on the old solipsistic saw: “Never mind, no matter.” I have always been intrigued by this denial of the mind-brain problem but have found it untenable in pursuing neurobehavioral and neuropsychological research. The results of the research - and I am aware of the criticism that the results of brain research can have no bearing on ontological issues — have led me to a position best described as a biological constructional realism. As a biologist and a physician I can attest to the ‘reality’ of the psychological as well as the physical constructions that I face daily in laboratory and clinic. My realism is therefore neither naive nor physicalistic. In addition, it differs from critical realism in its emphasis on construction; critical realists are prone to accept their perceptions of the physical world as more or less veridical - the constructionalist is apt to emphasize the relativistic nature of consensual validation.

Realism, style, and design

Abstract: Although the importance of providing realistic educational experiences involving the design of software systems has been recognized in many undergraduate curricula, it is difficult to consistently ...

The aesthetic realism of eli siegel as a teaching method in anthropology

Abstract: "Aesthetic Realism" is the new philosophy of education founded in 1941 by Eli Siegel, American critic and poet. It is exceedingly comprehensive because its purpose is to make it possible for people to like the world on an educated basis; that is, on honest terms. Since I have been studying aesthetic realism since fall 1968, I have come to like the world far more than I knew was possible. In my teaching of anthropology, I use the aesthetic realism method so that my students can use anthropology to like the world. There is no subject that cannot be taught from this point of view. The principles of aesthetic realism are true about anthropology. I do not believe it is possible to understand humanity adequately without understanding the import of these four statements by Eli Siegel: (1) Every person is always trying to put together opposites in himself. (2) Every person in order to respect himself has to see the world as beautiful or good or acceptable. (3) There is a disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world. (4) All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves. My opinion of aesthetic realism is sustained by very careful observation of myself and people I teach both in college and in aesthetic realism consultations, seminars, and workshops. It is also sustained by my anthropological research in New Guinea.

The Use and Function of Dreaming in Four Novels by Emilia Pardo Bazan

Abstract: that it scarcely need attract our attention. The dream with its use of symbol and metaphor seems to be a valid literary device and indeed has been so used during the last four thousand years. In his study of the dream in Gald6s' novels, Joseph Schraibman gives a brief history of the dream in world literature and regrets that as yet there has been no study of this phenomenon as it affects various periods of Hispanic writing.' This lack is particularly unfortunate, I believe, in the study of naturalistic novels of the nineteenth century. The naturalists have always been considered highly science-oriented, and indeed they make this claim for themselves. But nineteenth-century scientific views held that dreams were insignificant from a psychological point of view and merely reflected physiological conditions of the dreamer.2 This "somatic dispositions" theory held-to give a very simplified example-that a dream of intense heat or cold would actually reflect the body temperature of the dreamer rather than (as is now generally conceded) his ambitions, worries, and experiences. It was not until the publication of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 that the physiological theory of dreaming came under close scrutiny, and whereas Freud's ideas ultimately prevailed, it should be noted that this was only after much opposition from the holders of the somatic dispositions theory. In this light, then, the presence of dreams in the naturalistic narrative seems an interesting paradox. Although the inclusion of dreams in her novels does not distinguish Pardo Bazin from Zola, the initiator of naturalism, an examination of both authors' literary treatises on the naturalistic movement fails to account for their presence. Zola does not examine dreaming in Le Roman experimental, Les Romanciers naturalistes, and Le Naturalisme au theatre; and Pardo Bazain likewise disregards this subject in La cuestidn palpitante, where she recommends adopting Zola's scientific approach to literature -although accommodating this under the broader banner of realism. Does her fictional use of dreams coupled with her failure to mention them in this treatise

Walter Pater and Zola's Literary Reputation in England

Abstract: terms like Liberty, Democracy, Atheism abstract propositions about them in whatever interest, make one think sometimes of those worn old screws which turn either way v/ith equal facility, and compact nothing. VJhat we mean night be illustrated by Mr. Lilly's chapter on 'The Revolution and Art;' telling as it really is as an attack on the 'naturalism' which he holds to be the fruit of the Revolution, especially in literature. But was 'naturalism,' even as he understands it, finding it at its height in M. Zola's Nana, really born in 1789? did it not exist, like the revolutionary temper itself, from of old? Is not a certain kind of naturalism an element in all living art? And then Nana is very far from being characteristic of the v/hole scope of M. Zola's v/ork. UaS not the Revolution, after all, a kind of vicious running to seed of that principle of Individualism so nobly vindicated by Mr. Lilly himself as a discovery of Christianity or Catholicism?18 In his questions lie Pater's own habit of thought, the symbiotic reference points that stem from Greek culture and reappear in mediaeval, Renaissance and mpdern culture the Apollonian/Classic and the Dionysian/Romantic.1^ For Pater, "naturalism" is an abiding, timeless element of art and Zola's work is a heightening of the permanent artistic ideal of realism, the "directest use of imaginative skill." Pater discounts the pejorative overtones of "naturalism" and diffuses Lilly's criticism of Nana without the panache of the controversialist but v/ith the careful, casual reference implying, "no doubt, everyone will know this,"

Myth and Neurosis in Ibsen's Mature Plays

Abstract: Myth and realism are quite incompatible, we suppose. Their curious marriage in Ibsen's plays, in which mythic patterns are enacted by the Norwegian burghers and their matrons, poses problems which call the nature of modern myth criticism into question. The case is not unique, of course. Eliot praised Joyce's use of myth in Ulysses, and described its function as that of a template, imposing form on the chaos of modern life Л But Ibsen, writing earlier, depicts not a chaotic world which needs shaping, but a highly structured world in the process of unravelling. Orley Holtan's important study of mythic patterns in Ibsen's plays2 employs a method borrowed from Jung, Frye, Cassirer, and other proponents of the archetype, who classify myth semantically, according to content. 3 Holtan therefore looks for archetypal myth structures in Ibsen's work Frye's quest pattern and Campbell's monomyth, for example and for myth content, such as the inclusion of supernatural beings and improbable events. This method prompts him to conclude that only the early and the late plays of Ibsen are mythic in nature. He classifies the "social dramas" of the middle period in terms borrowed from Frye, as myth displaced in favor of realism: "They operate in a human world in which the supernatural is absent and causes and effects are, in large part, realistically determined."4 By aligning myth with the sacred and realism with the secular, Holtan fails to avail himself of those critical tools which would allow him to overcome the dichotomy of myth and the real, and to analyze simultaneously the compelling structural principle which governs Ibsen's last twelve plays. Contemporary structuralism, particularly the myth criticism of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, offers a way of looking for repetitions, similarities, differences, and other relationships