Realism

About: Realism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 10799 publications have been published within this topic receiving 175785 citations.

Experimentation and Scientific Realism

Abstract: Experimental physics provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. Entities that in principle cannot be observed are regularly manipulated to produce new phenomena and to investigate other aspects of nature. They are tools, instruments not for thinking but for doing.

Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction

Abstract: Darwin s theory thrust human life into time and nature and subjected it to naturalistic rather than spiritual or moral analysis Insisting on gradual and regular lawful change, Darwinian thought nevertheless requires acknowledgment of chance and randomness for a full explanation of biological phenomena George Levine shows how these conceptions affected nineteenth century novelists from Dickens and Trollope to Conrad and draws illuminating contrasts with the pre Darwinian novel and the perspective of natural theologyLevine demonstrates how even writers ostensibly uninterested in science absorbed and influenced its vision A central chapter treats the almost aggressively unscientific Trollope as the most Darwinian of the novelists, who worked out a gradualist realism that is representative of the mainstream of Victorian fiction and strikingly consonant with key Darwinian ideas Levine s boldly conceived analysis of such authors as Scott and Dickens demonstrates the pervasiveness and power of this revolution in thought and sheds new light on Victorian realism"

Making a mess with method

Abstract: If the world is non-coherent, then methods that seek and describe it as coherent are making a mess of doing so. This argument is developed empirically and philosophically. After showing that the comment sense realism of standard methods works to other non-coherence, the chapter recommends non-coherent or 'messy' methods.

The gender of modernity

Abstract: ‘Modernity’ is a relatively new term in literary scholarship on the turn of the twentieth century. Sociologists organise their research around issues of ‘modernisation’ unique to this period: the Taylorisation of industrial production, the professionalisation of science and the organisation of the modern research university, the development of new mediums and media for both mass transportation and mass communication, and the impact on the conceptualisation of a public sphere of women’s and non-whites’ advocacy for an extension of the rights of citizenship to previously excluded populations. Sociologists focus as well on the ‘dramatic transformations of worldviews and philosophies’ encompassed by the still broader term ‘modernity’ (290). By contrast, literary scholars typically have mapped late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history in terms of a neat, clean and emphatically teleological succession of literary movements, charting a ‘progress’ from realism to either naturalism or aestheticism and Decadence and then to Modernism. Rather than entertaining the possibility that these aesthetic modes can exist simultaneously in the same text, or that they were produced and marketed for different audiences throughout this period, the emphasis until quite recently has been placed on literary Modernism’s success in ‘extricat[ing] itself and our epoch from the fin de siecle ’. That is to say, artists and literary critics claiming Modernism to be the aesthetic of modernity first established its position front-and-centre in the cultural landscape by putting other aesthetic paradigms either ‘behind’ it or ‘below’ it (or both).