Beginning Realism

Beginning Realism PDF Author: Steven Earnshaw
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847794041
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
Realism is an essential concept in literary studies, yet for a variety of reasons it has not received the attention and clarity it deserves, often being dismissed as ‘too slippery’ to be of use. This accessible study remedies that failing for students and scholars of English Literature and Literary Theory alike, plainly setting out what realism is, the issues surrounding it, and its role in other major literary modes such as modernism and postmodernism. Beginning Realism gives detailed coverage of the nineteenth-century realist novel through its focus on novels by Gaskell, Eliot, Trollope, Dickens, Mrs Oliphant, Thackeray and Zola. As well as discussing ‘the novel’, the book also includes chapters on the use of realism in drama and poetry and a chapter on ‘the language of realism’, another aspect often overlooked in analysis of the concept.

Beginning Realism

Beginning Realism PDF Author: Steven Earnshaw
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847794041
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 390

Get Book Here

Book Description
Realism is an essential concept in literary studies, yet for a variety of reasons it has not received the attention and clarity it deserves, often being dismissed as ‘too slippery’ to be of use. This accessible study remedies that failing for students and scholars of English Literature and Literary Theory alike, plainly setting out what realism is, the issues surrounding it, and its role in other major literary modes such as modernism and postmodernism. Beginning Realism gives detailed coverage of the nineteenth-century realist novel through its focus on novels by Gaskell, Eliot, Trollope, Dickens, Mrs Oliphant, Thackeray and Zola. As well as discussing ‘the novel’, the book also includes chapters on the use of realism in drama and poetry and a chapter on ‘the language of realism’, another aspect often overlooked in analysis of the concept.

Methodical Realism

Methodical Realism PDF Author: Etienne Gilson
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1586173049
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Book Description
This short book is a work of one of the 20th century's greatest philosophers and historians of philosophy, Etienne Gilson. The book's title, taken from the first chapter, may sound esoteric but it reflects a common-sense outlook on the world, applied in a methodical way. That approach, known as realism, consists in emphasizing the fact that what is real precedes our concepts about it. In contrast to realism stands idealism, which refers to the philosophical outlook that begins with ideas and tries to move from them to things. Gilson shows how the common-sense notion of realism, though denied by many thinkers, is indispensible for a correct understanding of things--of what is and how we know what is. He shows the flaws of idealism and he critiques efforts to introduce elements of idealism into realist philosophy (immediate realism). At the same time, the author criticizes failures of certain realist philosophers--including Aristotle--to be consistent in their own principles and to begin from sound starting points. To these problems, Gilson traces medieval philosophy's failure in the realm of science, which led early modern scientific thinkers of the 17th century unnecessarily to reject even the best of medieval scholastic philosophy. He concludes with The Realist Beginner's Handbook, a summary of key points for thinking clearly about reality and about the knowledge of it.

In the Beginning Was the Deed

In the Beginning Was the Deed PDF Author: Bernard Williams
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140082673X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Bernard Williams is remembered as one of the most brilliant and original philosophers of the past fifty years. Widely respected as a moral philosopher, Williams began to write about politics in a sustained way in the early 1980s. There followed a stream of articles, lectures, and other major contributions to issues of public concern--all complemented by his many works on ethics, which have important implications for political theory. This new collection of essays, most of them previously unpublished, addresses many of the core subjects of political philosophy: justice, liberty, and equality; the nature and meaning of liberalism; toleration; power and the fear of power; democracy; and the nature of political philosophy itself. A central theme throughout is that political philosophers need to engage more directly with the realities of political life, not simply with the theories of other philosophers. Williams makes this argument in part through a searching examination of where political thinking should originate, to whom it might be addressed, and what it should deliver. Williams had intended to weave these essays into a connected narrative on political philosophy with reflections on his own experience of postwar politics. Sadly he did not live to complete it, but this book brings together many of its components. Geoffrey Hawthorn has arranged the material to resemble as closely as possible Williams's original design and vision. He has provided both an introduction to Williams's political philosophy and a bibliography of his formal and informal writings on politics. Those who know the work of Bernard Williams will find here the familiar hallmarks of his writing--originality, clarity, erudition, and wit. Those who are unfamiliar with, or unconvinced by, a philosophical approach to politics, will find this an engaging introduction. Both will encounter a thoroughly original voice in modern political theory and a searching approach to the shape and direction of liberal political thought in the past thirty-five years.

Socialist Realism

Socialist Realism PDF Author: Trisha Low
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 1566895596
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
When Trisha Low moves west, her journey is motivated by the need to arrive “somewhere better”—someplace utopian, like revolution; or safe, like home; or even clarifying, like identity. Instead, she faces the end of her relationships, a family whose values she has difficulty sharing, and America’s casual racism, sexism, and homophobia. In this book-length essay, the problem of how to account for one's life comes to the fore—sliding unpredictably between memory, speculation, self-criticism, and art criticism, Low seeks answers that she knows she won't find. Attempting to reconcile her desires with her radical politics, she asks: do our quests to fulfill our deepest wishes propel us forward, or keep us trapped in the rubble of our deteriorating world?

The Atlantic Realists

The Atlantic Realists PDF Author: Matthew Specter
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 150362997X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
In The Atlantic Realists, intellectual historian Matthew Specter offers a boldly revisionist interpretation of "realism," a prevalent stance in post-WWII US foreign policy and public discourse and the dominant international relations theory during the Cold War. Challenging the common view of realism as a set of universally binding truths about international affairs, Specter argues that its major features emerged from a century-long dialogue between American and German intellectuals beginning in the late nineteenth century. Specter uncovers an "Atlantic realist" tradition of reflection on the prerogatives of empire and the nature of power politics conditioned by fin de siècle imperial competition, two world wars, the Holocaust, and the Cold War. Focusing on key figures in the evolution of realist thought, including Carl Schmitt, Hans Morgenthau, and Wilhelm Grewe, this book traces the development of the realist worldview over a century, dismantling myths about the national interest, Realpolitik, and the "art" of statesmanship.

Realism

Realism PDF Author: James Malpas
Publisher: Tate Gallery Publishing Limited
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 92

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Book Description
A study of the typical chracteristics of twentieth-century realism.

The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America

The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America PDF Author: Vernon Parrington
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351305352
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description
This final volume of Vernon Louis Parrington's Pultzer Prize-winning study deals with the decay of romantic optimism. It shows that the cause of decay is attributed to three sources: stratifying of economics under the pressure of centralization; the rise of mechanistic science; and the emergence of a spirit of skepticism which, with teachings of the sciences and lessons of intellectuals, has resulted in the questioning of democratic ideals. Parrington presents the movement of liberalism from 1913 to 1917, and the reaction to it following World War I. He notes that liberals announced that democratic hopes had not been fulfilled; the Constitution was not a democratic instrument nor was it intended to be; and while Americans had professed to create a democracy, they had in fact created a plutocracy. Industrialization of America under the leadership of the middle class and the rise of critical attitudes towards the ideals and handiwork of that class are examined in great detail. Parrington's interpretation of the literature during this time focuses on four divisions of development: the conquest of America by the middle class; the challenge of that overlordship by democratic agrarianism; the intellectual revolution brought about by science and the appropriation of science by the middle class; and the rise of detached criticism by younger intellectuals. A new introduction by Bruce Brown highlights Parrington's life and explains the importance of this volume.

Imaginative Realism

Imaginative Realism PDF Author: James Gurney
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 0740785508
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
A examination of time-tested methods used by artists since the Renaissance to make realistic pictures of imagined things.

The Universe of Things

The Universe of Things PDF Author: Steven Shaviro
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145294282X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
From the rediscovery of Alfred North Whitehead’s work to the rise of new materialist thought, including object-oriented ontology, there has been a rapid turn toward speculation in philosophy as a way of moving beyond solely human perceptions of nature and existence. Now Steven Shaviro maps this quickly emerging speculative realism, which is already dramatically influencing how we interpret reality and our place in a universe in which humans are not the measure of all things. The Universe of Things explores the common insistence of speculative realism on a noncorrelationist thought: that things or objects exist apart from how our own human minds relate to and comprehend them. Shaviro focuses on how Whitehead both anticipates and offers challenges to prevailing speculative realist thought, moving between Whitehead’s own panpsychism, Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and the reductionist eliminativism of Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier. The stakes of this recent speculative realist thought—of the effort to develop new ways of grasping the world—are enormous as it becomes clear that our inherited assumptions are no longer adequate to describe, much less understand, the reality we experience around us. As Shaviro acknowledges, speculative realist thought has its dangers, but it also, like the best speculative fiction, holds the potential to liberate us from confining views of what is outside ourselves and, he believes, to reclaim aesthetics and beauty as a principle of life itself. Bringing together a wide array of contemporary thought, and evenhandedly assessing its current debates, The Universe of Things is an invaluable guide to the evolution of speculative realism and the provocation of Alfred North Whitehead’s pathbreaking work.

Roots of Realism

Roots of Realism PDF Author: Benjamin Frankel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135210144
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
Political realism sees politics as a permanent struggle for power and security. The essays in this volume examine the tradition of realist political analysis of international relations from the Sophists and Thucydides to the modern era.