Modern Realism Research Articles

Acting, Embodiment, and Text: Hedda Gabler and Possible Uses of Cognitive Science

Acting, Embodiment, and Text:Hedda Gabler and Possible Uses of Cognitive Science Rhonda Blair (bio) In spring 2009, I led a workshop staging of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler for the Division of Theatre at Southern Methodist University in order to provide some of our MFA students with an opportunity to work on a major piece of modern realism. Our purpose was to focus on embodiment and relationship in acting, which drew on research I have been doing in cognitive neuroscience. Although I first focused on the individual actor, particularly in regard to text and action, I am now exploring applications of science to partnered work. Informed by research on embodiment, cognition, and the relationship among individuals, I wanted to investigate ways to help actors understand not that they need to "be in their body," but that they are, in fact, nothing if they are not a body. The phrase "be in your body" is useful though potentially problematic, in much the same way that the ubiquitous Meisnerian "get out of your head" is. While we more or less know what these phrases mean, the images they conjure up perpetuate false binaries that split mind from body and risk hobbling the actor by giving her a false, fragmented image of herself. The cognitive and neurosciences can define more accurately how the various aspects of the actor's self affect and even arise out of one another, and help her to more effectively manipulate those different aspects in engaging her fellow performers and creating a role. What we did physically with Hedda might not have looked terribly different from some standard approaches to acting, but the actors' understanding of what we were doing, their point of view, their imagery work, and our intense focus on relationship varied in some significant regards. Second-year MFA actors played the roles of Hedda, Tesman, Thea, and Lovborg; an undergraduate senior played Berte; and two faculty colleagues—professional actors Leslie Brott and Jack Greenman—played Aunt Julie and Judge Brack. Our "lab" environment freed us from pressures of an "opening night" or a paying audience, though I still wished we had had more time. Our initial plan was to work throughout the semester, but, because of schedule conflicts with other productions, we were limited to twenty-four hours a week for half that time, roughly six weeks. Our arena configuration in a small studio space seated roughly thirty-five people; we used only rehearsal furniture and props; clothes were pulled from actors' closets; and we had some lighting that was designed and executed as we were rehearsing. We were concerned with historical period or accuracy only insofar as it strengthened our emotional and imaginative engagement with the play's story. Because I had directed Hedda twice before in fully produced, academic theatre season offerings, I knew the play well and was able to jump quickly into substantial work on key elements in the text. I understood the pitfalls of the script, such as the dangers of melodrama and "neck-up" acting, dangers of presumption about how Ibsen "should be done," the speed of the plot and action—huge revelations, turns-on-a-dime, extremity of the feelings, which might lead one to overlook the humor and emotional amplitude of the play. We limited table work—the traditional "first phase" of the process in which director and actors read carefully through the play and discuss meaning, context, and possible interpretations prior to getting the work on its feet. While table work and preliminary discussion are necessary, too much can constrain the more experiential aspects of an actor's discovery. The wrong kind of table [End Page 11] work can inhibit by defining a too-narrow range of possible outcomes, closing down exploration too quickly. Actors can abuse table work to make premature choices about character and action before they get on their feet. (I am put in mind of Meryl Streep's response to Mike Nichols's question about her acting process: "Oh, you never know what you're going to do until you do it" [Streep, qtd. in McGrath 2009].) This is related to the challenge of getting actors to use themselves, particularly their imaginations, as...

Fictions of Encounter: Eighteenth-Century Imaginary Voyages to the Antipodes

The was an early form of the modern realist novel popular in Britain and France from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, set predominantly in the region of Australasia and the Pacific. As a branch of travel literature, it was linked intimately to the expansion of empire. Through repeated stories of successful colonizing schemes and heroic accounts of cross-cultural encounters between European travelers and the people of the antipodes, these texts allowed European readers to enjoy farfetched fantasies of colonization well before, and during, the period of actual colonial expansion. As in the case of the many better-known examples of literary fiction produced in the later period of European imperial dominance, imaginary voyage fiction helped embed social acceptance of colonial expansion by modeling cultural domination as natural, beneficial, and welcome. Surprisingly, the genre continued to thrive when documentary accounts of actual voyages to the antipodes began to emerge. Now, however, the imaginary voyage receives little attention, and has all but disappeared from public awareness. This essay describes and explores some key aspects of this long-neglected genre, with the aim of showing that it played a more important role both in terms of literary history and in the history of colonization itself than has hitherto been recognized. More specifically, its deliberate exploitation of the shifting boundaries between reality and fantasy casts light on the development of literary realism and especially on the uneasy relationship between fact and fiction that continues to challenge historians and literary critics to this day. Intrinsically linked to this blurring of boundaries was the role of this forgotten genre in the shaping of the colonial imagination. (1) Typically, imaginary voyages are both utopian in their visions of fictional worlds and written in a satirical style that allows veiled attacks on contemporary political figures and practices. Critics trace the genre's origins to forms of literary romance and utopian projection. Although its status as a prototype for the modern realist novel and precursor to the genres of science fiction and fantasy are well recognized, the genre has generally been marginalized or overlooked, mainly on the grounds that the imaginary voyage texts had limited truth value when compared with contemporary accounts of genuine travels. On this basis, the imaginary voyage was seen mainly as a fanciful precursor to documentaries of travel, and as having been displaced by them. But there was another reason, I would suggest, for the lack of critical attention. In terms of genre, imaginary voyages fell between two stools: representing neither history nor romance but a strange marriage of the two. Imaginary voyages reflected and exploited a particular moment in the history of maritime exploration when the edges of the known world were being extended and the public was eager to suspend belief and be part of the process of discovery. When that moment passed, imaginary voyages lost the connection with real history that had served them so well, but had not developed a sufficiently strong identity purely as fiction to claim lasting critical recognition. (2) In retrospect, however, the imaginary voyage genre can be seen as a significant link in the chain of a long tradition, stretching back to very early forms of fictional narrative and forward to the later writers who traveled in their minds to the depths of the sea, to the interior of the earth, to other planets, and to the future. Today most of the writings that form this body of work are almost completely unknown. This essay begins by discussing the colonialist themes and common textual strategies employed by writers of eighteenth-century accounts of imaginary voyages, especially those set in the region of the antipodes. This is followed by a detailed investigation of the social and literary contexts in which these works were published and received by a reading public eager to learn of newly discovered lands. …

More Revisions in Realism

Thomas Hobbes is regarded as a major intellectual precursor of realist theory. Such veneration has brought about ample reactions from various scholars who aver that the use of Hobbes'vision of anarchy as an analogy for building greater theories of international relations is problematic at best. Yet, while such critiques of the realist analogy have been abundant, they have devoted scant attention to important passages in the Leviathan (that is, the tale of the fool in Chapter 15) that would produce greater clarity about Hobbes' logic regarding the state of nature. Indeed, a careful textual analysis of the tale of the fool demonstrates that as an analogy for a state of war (that is, as an environment devoid of cooperation) Hobbes' vision of anarchy is even more problematic than what previous critiques suggest. The tale strongly re-inforces critical scholarship that embraces ample opportunities for cooperation (covenants) in a Hobbesian state of nature (that is, without a Leviathan to impose order). The precise Hobbesian logic evident in this tale, in fact, reflects both strong neoliberal and constructivist elements in what many would consider a least-likely place: in Hobbes' vision of anarchy. So while Hobbes has been hailed as the first early modern realist, he could also be cited as the first early modern neoliberal and constructivist. In this respect, Hobbes' own synthesis of elements of realism, constructivism and neoliberalism holds much promise for inspiring a new and more sophisticated vision of international relations: Cosmopolitik.

Why Are Revisionist States Revisionist? Reviving Classical Realism as an Approach to Understanding International Change

In this article, we argue that Realism recently has eschewed big and important questions of war and peace and that revived Classical Realism can help bring Realism back on track. Modern Realists tend to assume that states are either all status quo players or all revisionists, and the result is a slippery grasp of the sources and dynamics of international change. To revive Classical Realism, we examine three dominant sets of criticism. We notably return to the classical texts of Realism to show that the classics were in fact not reductionist: they did not reduce either systemic or national phenomena (third and second image theory) to human nature (first image). Classical Realists understood the many intricate and delicate connections between these levels, and it is modern era Realists who are reductionists because they reduce explanations to systemic phenomena. We show how Classical Realism can respond in strength to its critics and ask the kind of research questions that again will advance our understanding of international change.

Before I Die (review)

Reviewed by: Before I Die Deborah Stevenson Downham, Jenny Before I Die. Fickling, 2007 [320p] Library ed. ISBN 978-0-385-75158-2$18.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-385-75155-1$15.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-12 When Tessa says, "I wish I had a boyfriend," she may be expressing the desire of the typical sixteen-year-old girl, but she's far from typical: she's dying of leukemia. With the help of her rebellious friend, Zoey, she's hoping to get through a list of achievements, ranging from committing a crime to becoming famous, before her life is over, but it's really love, including fulfilling sex, that she yearns to experience. Fate kindly delivers in the form of her next-door neighbor, Adam, who has little in his life beyond the tending of his depressed mother; as Tessa's body finds it increasingly difficult to fight her cancer, she finds satisfaction and consolation in her physical and emotional relationship with Adam. British author Downham has created a fully fledged and satisfying contemporary tearjerker: there's enough grit in the details to give the plot traction, but underneath the veneer of modern realism is an old-fashioned lush and tragic romance. Characters are effectively depicted, from Zoey, the wild child suddenly matured by her pregnancy, to energetic little Cal, Tessa's younger brother; Tessa's parents, responsible Dad and flaky Mum, are particularly well drawn, with their varying reactions to her decline and the reopened relationship that her illness brings the separated couple ("I wanted them to get back together," says a slightly disappointed Tessa on seeing their flirtation, "but . . . I thought they'd be deeper than this"). The underlying question of "What would [End Page 80] you do if you knew you were dying?" (also found in Crutcher's Deadline, reviewed above) adds philosophical interest, and readers will enjoy contemplating it while contentedly sniffling their way through the pages. Copyright © 2007 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

A social institutional approach to identifying generation cohorts in China with a comparison with American consumers

Identifying distinctive target segments is a fundamental challenge faced by international marketers. This paper describes an approach to understanding consumer market structures in an important international market, China, and to segmenting Chinese consumers by integrating insights from generational cohort and social institutional theories. We conduct two empirical studies to verify how China's recent momentous ideological events could give rise to and affect the life experiences of different generation cohorts in the country. The results of Study 1 support the conceptual framework and establish three distinct cohorts in China: Red Guards, Modern Realists, and Global Materialists. Study 2 builds on the findings of Study 1: it links cohort differences to differences in consumer values (materialism) and choice behaviors (foreign vs local brands), and then compares them with parallel consumers in the United States. This paper outlines and tests an approach to segmentation that can help international firms identify distinct segments in and design effective marketing strategies for China.

Modern Japanese theatre and performance

Chapter 1 Introduction: Modern Japanese Theatre (Revisited) Part 2 Shingeki History Chapter 3 Why Did Sewamono Not Grow into Modern Realist Theatre? Chapter 4 The Rhetoric of the Real Chapter 5 Moment(um) of Memory: Metapatterns in Japanese Theatre Since the 1960s Chapter 6 The Quest for Salvation in Japan's Modern History: Four Plays by Akimoto Matsuyo Chapter 7 Poison Women and National Identity in Postwar Japanese Performance Chapter 8 Senda Koreya and the Tenko Paradigm Part 9 Experimental Theatre(s) and Border Crossings Chapter 10 Structureless in Structure: The Choreographic Tectonics of Hijikata Tatsumi's Buto Chapter 11 Terayama in Amsterdam and the Internationalization of Experimental Theatre Chapter 12 Super-kyogen: Radically Traditional Utopian Comedies Chapter 13 Classical Japanese Performance in a Contemporary Context: A Traditional Strategy of Juxtaposition Part 14 Specific Plays and Productions in Modern Japan Chapter 15 Illegitimate Child of Shingeki: Soganoya Gokuro and His Nonkina tosan (Easygoing Daddy) Chapter 16 Reflections of and on the Times: Morimoto Kaoru's A Woman's Life Chapter 17 Steeplechase: Mishima Yukio's Only Original Modern No Play Chapter 18 Destroying the Audience's Alibi: Empathy and Ethics in Abe Kobo's Mihitsu no koi Chapter 19 Divine Memory and Abject Reality: Miyagi Satoshi's Tenshu Monogatari and Simizu Shinjin's Bye Bye: The New Primitive Chapter 20 From Scaretto to Kaze to tomo ni sarinu: Musical Adaptations of Gone with the Wind in Japan Part 21 A Super-kyogen Script Chapter 22 Mutsugoro (Mudskippers)

Saving the Wretched of the Earth

In this essay, I consider biblical and theological representations of the physics of Spirit, including miracles, if also the politics of compassion, as related to bodies exhibiting disabilities. Christianity has shaped its understanding of divine power and, consequently, its social mission upon the dynamic trajectory it has read into miracle stories. And miracle stories, modern Christianity has assumed, obviously pivot upon the disabled body. I extend my range of concern to address how the modern template of normalcy and its contrary, degeneracy, have been deployed as maps of western Christianity's social mission. By concentrating on our reading of biblical theologies, especially our reading of Jesus as one with the monolithic power of Spirit to heal the blind, the cripple, the outcast, I attempt to deconstruct theology's psychic cathection to normalcy. I consider whether particular colonizing optics are still at work in today's most popular Christological proposals, the so-called "historical Jesus" portraits of Marcus Borg (1987) and John Dominic Crossan (1992). The essay concludes by suggesting another way of reading the miracle texts so as to disturb the optics of modern realism, especially their social effects

Thucydides and Modern Realism

This paper makes two main arguments about the relationship between Thucydides, modern realism, and the key conceptual ideas they introduce to situate and explain international politics. First, Thucydides refutes the central claim underlying modern realist scholarship, that the sources of state behavior can be located not in the character of the primary political units but in the decentralized system or structure created by their interaction. Second, however, analyses that discuss Thucydides exclusively with respect to this “third-image” realism do not take into account the most important emendation made to political realism in the last half of the twentieth century, Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics . Waltz reformulates the theory of how anarchic political structures affect the behavior of their constituent units and suggests that the question posed by realism—and to be asked of Thucydides—is not whether states behave according to the Athenian thesis or consistently observe the power-political laws of nature, but whether they suffer “costs” in terms of political autonomy, security, and cultural integrity if they do not. Many scholars are therefore incorrect to assume that demonstrating the importance of non-structural factors in The Peloponnesian War severs the connection between Thucydides and structural realism. Thucydides may in fact be a realist, but not for reasons conventionally assumed.

The tragic vision of politics: ethics, interests and orders

Is it possible to preserve national security through ethical policies? Richard Ned Lebow seeks to show that ethics are actually essential to the national interest. Recapturing the wisdom of classical realism through a close reading of the texts of Thucydides, Clausewitz and Hans Morgenthau, Lebow argues that, unlike many modern realists, classic realists saw close links between domestic and international politics, and between interests and ethics. Lebow uses this analysis to offer a powerful critique of post-Cold War American foreign policy. He also develops an ontological foundation for ethics and makes the case for an alternate ontology for social science based on Greek tragedy's understanding of life and politics. This is a topical and accessible book, written by a leading scholar in the field.

The postmodern realism of Barth's ethics

In light of current discussions in theological ethics, Karl Barth's ethics can be understood within the dialectical relationship of ‘postmodern’ and ‘realism’. Barth shifts theological ethics beyond anthropocentric Kantian or naturalist inspired ‘modern realism’ on the one hand, and a nihilist or deconstructionist inspired ‘postmodern antirealism’ on the other. Beginning with the centrality of the Word of God, Barth deconstructs modern (anthropocentric) moral realism, while at the same time reestablishing this same moral realism on theological grounds, which ironically moves it beyond the claims of postmodernism itself. What makes Barth's thought post-modern, then, is not his similarity to antirealist and deconstructionist thought, but his departure from its secular and anti-theological assumptions. Barth's ‘postmodern realism’, therefore, not only provides a way for contemporary theological ethics to dialectically be critical and hopeful, deconstructive and constructive, decentering and centering, but does so from the anti-anthropocentric and anti-secular standpoint of the Word of God.

Money or Mind?: Cecilia , the Novel, and the Real Madness of Selfhood

Money or Mind? Cecilia, the Novel, and the Real Madness of Selfhood SUSAN C. GREENFIELD Aman, apparently depressed by his economically constrained and repetitive life, compulsively reads romances. He then dons his forefathers' rusty armor, devises a helmet out of cardboard, changes his own name and status (as well as that of his horse), and sets off on an adventure about the problem of material reality. Designated mad because he sees windmills as giants, sheep as soldiers, and prostitutes as ladies, Don Quixote is famous because he fathoms absent bodies in mundane objects—because the presence of romances makes him long for the nonexistent. If, as many have argued, Cervantes's work influenced eighteenth-century English writers and helped inaugurate the modern realist novel, then perhaps this is partly because the narrative exposes the very problem of reality. What is realistic about Don Quixote is the painful inadequacy of a world that cannot begin to accommodate the mind. Psychological survival ironically depends on the mad act of imagining the missing. Frances Burney's Cecilia (1782) makes several references to Don Quixote, and among the knight errant's many descendants, I would count the eponymous heroine who is briefly but decidedly insane toward the novel's end.1 Though Cecilia's madness marks her involuntary reaction to social victimization whereas Quixote thinks it "beaut[iful]" to go mad 49 50 / GREENFIELD "without a cause,"2 they share the calamity of absence and the fantasies it provokes. Don Quixote performs feats for his imagined lady Dulcinea, and Cecilia heroically raves to her missing husband: "Oh beloved of my heart! ... I will snatch thee from destruction!" (899). In both cases, madness signals the mind's detachment from the real world and the centrality of fantasy on the spectrum of thought. This essay considers the historical and psychoanalytic value of understanding the early modern English novel in general, and Frances Burney's Cecilia in particular, in terms of this paradigm. I am interested in how the novel problematizes the relationship between reality and the mind. And I am interested in how what is unreal or immaterial (like Don Quixote's giants or Cecilia's "beloved" husband) shapes the delusions that define the novel's thinking self. "Reality" is, of course, notoriously difficult to define. I use it only in the restricted sense as that which "actually exist[s]" and which is in "implicit or explicit contrast with [the] imaginary" or fictitious.3 To the countless debates about the novel's "formal realism" I would add that novels are themselves often concerned with what is not real or not materially certain. Even a text steeped in such physical detail as Robinson Crusoe devotes far more space to Crusoe's fear of the cannibals he does not see for fifteen years than it does to their eventual appearance; the seemingly endless pages of Clarissa consist of letters between distant people about characters who rarely meet and a rape that defies physical description; and Tristram Shandy spends a good third of his "autobiography" discussing the years before his existence and the birth that nearly killed him. As I will suggest more specifically about Cecilia, in each of these novels, thought exists in tension with material reality and is often enriched by what is missing. At the essay's end, I speculate about how modern theories of psychological subjectivity are premised on a distinction between the mind and reality and on the roles literal loss and existential absence play in selfdevelopment . In The Ego and the Id, for instance, Freud aligns the difference between "what is real and what is psychical" with that "between the external . . . and the internal world."4 Stressing the dominance of fantasy, distorted memories and unrealizable desires, psychoanalysis implies that thought passes in a mind organized around the missing. Even the fetishism of an object marks the displacement or absence of the "normal sexual" one in Freud's early work and the substitute for the lost maternal phallus (that never really existed) in his essay on the subject.5 My purpose below is to sketch the early modern history of such unreality and the role the novel may have played in defining it as...

Is there room for international law in realpolitik?: accounting for the US ‘attitude’ towards international law

The United States has in recent years come under considerable criticism for its apparently cynical attitude towards international law. While the US administration refers often to the importance of the international rule of law it appears unwilling to itself be bound by that law. While the US took the lead in the post World War II years in establishing international law and institutions it has in recent years appeared unwilling to give those same institutions its full support. This article begins by examining a range of explanations for the seemingly undesirable US attitude towards international law. Dismissing each as inadequate on its own, the article demonstrates how what often appear to be contradictory aspects of the United States' relationship with international law can in fact be reconciled through the application to United States' behaviour of the basic tenets of classic modern realism as it pertains to the conduct of foreign policy. This is surprising since international law and realpolitik are more often contrasted. The United States' ‘attitude’ towards international law is better explained not as a post-Cold War anomaly but as having been an integral aspect of the rise of the United States to sole superpower status.

The battle for realism: figurative art in Britain during the Cold War, 1945-1960

Art historian James Hyman takes a fresh look at the crucial years after the Second World War when attempts were made to revive European culture and debates about the future of art were fierce. The author proposes that realism in Europe during the early Cold War years occupied a radical vanguard position and stood in opposition to the competing claims made for American Abstract Expressionism. He examines two distinct visions of realism - social realism and Modernist realism - and explores their political implications and ideological significance. Hyman argues that this Battle for Realism shaped and internationalised British art and addresses a range of artists, from Modernist realists such as Auerbach, Bacon, Freud, Kossoff, Moore and Sutherland to social realists Hogarth, de Francia and the 'kitchen-sink painters'. He also illuminates the impact of foreign and emigre artists on British culture, addressing artists such as Giacometti, Guttuso and Picasso, and examining the claims made for London as an art centre to rival the Ecole de Paris and the New York School. Hyman draws on contemporary critical writing to give fresh insights into the art debates of the period and gives new prominence to the central roles of the critics John Berger and David Sylvester.

Black Orpheus: Richard Wright's "The man Who Lived Underground"

Leaving, then, the white world, I stepped within the veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses. W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk 1903 The Who Lived (1945) by Wright tells the story of an epic journey that classical and modern, and American writers have told numerous times. (1) A fugitive escapes to the underground sewer of an unnamed city. In the footsteps of Orpheus and Odysseus, Virgil and Dante, Ishmael and Queequeg, Huck and Jim, he begins to explore the underworld, the world of darkness, nature, and death. (2) It is a modern version of the fugitive slave narrative, a literary form whose most famous representative, Frederick Douglass, is honored through the initials of Fred Daniels, the novella's African American protagonist. (3) As he escapes from corrupt history and corrupting society into ostensibly free and liberating nature, Fred Daniels is suddenly transformed from privileged house servant to underground criminal-discoverer-explorer. discoveries that Fred Daniels makes in the course of his underground journey are significant and multiple. They concern the racist society aboveground, his own status as an exile and an invisible man, and the language available to modern art and to the African American artist in that society. As s/he accompanies Fred Daniels through the underground sewer, the reader also undertakes a journey to discover the view from behind the veil that marks the protagonist's experience as an African American servant and artist in a racist and class society. (4) In the tradition of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground (1864) and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), the novella also tells the story of a metaphorical journey into the aesthetic underground of modern art. In the course of this journey, Fred Daniels revisits the romantic conflicts dramatized by Ishmael and Ahab, Huck and Tom, on the one hand, and the post-romantic ones voiced by Dostoyevsky's narrator and Conrad's sailor, on the other. Like these literary predecessors, Fred Daniels confronts reason and unreason, rationality and sensuality, society and nature. Unlike them, he encounters these aesthetic dilemmas through the specific perspective of the African American experience in a world where reason and rationality have become synonymous with racism. (5) While familiar to and valued by Wright specialists, is not known as a classic of American modernism, despite the numerous scholars who have recognized the great artistic merit of the novella. (6) In the estimation of these scholars, The Who Lived is most accomplished piece of short fiction (Bryant 378), one woven of the same exacting perfection as a poem (Fabre, Richard 220). (7) Recognition of The Man as a modernist classic of American literature has been hindered by obstacles that have restricted Wright's recognition within the American and African American modernist canons. (8) First, Wright is frequently classified as a Southern author, his significance limited to having witnessed and survived the lynching, terror, and violent segregation of the pre-modern Jim Crow South. (9) Secondly, literary critics have voiced ambivalent praise for Wright's work and for the modern realist poetics he represents. (10) Thirdly, critics routinely ignore what they classify as Wright's European writings, the larger part of Wright's output. Lastly, The Man, which was written before but published after Wright went into exile in 1947, tends to be read as an expression of Wright's encounter with French existentialism rather than his ongoing reflection on alienation and racism in the United States. (11) These misguided views notwithstanding, literary critics have produced a substantial body of scholarship on The Man. Critics have especially examined its themes and motifs, its style and ideas, its biblical, classical, and modern themes, and its poetic, aesthetic, and philosophical concerns. …

Nightingale's realist philosophy of science

Abstract This paper examines Florence Nightingale's realist philosophy of science by comparing it to the contemporaneously dominant philosophy of positivism. It starts by adumbrating the tenets of positivism and continues by assessing the degree to which Nightingale accepted or rejected those tenets. It is argued that while she accepted much of positivism, on realist grounds she opposed its belief in phenomenalism, its rejection of speculative philosophy, its separation of fact and value, and its rejection of religion. Following an examination of how Nightingale's philosophy impinged on her approach to nursing and health care, the paper concludes with a comparison of her ideas with those of modern realism and a discussion of the contemporary salience of her ideas. It is argued that while some aspects of her approach may no longer provide an appropriate basis for modern nursing, her environmental approach, her transcendental realism, and her adherence to caring values may still be of use to contemporary nurses.

Madness and Military History in Balzac's "Adieu"

The distinctiveness of Honore de Balzac's Comedie humaine has often been linked to its representation of contemporary society. For both Erich Auerbach and Georg Lukacs, for instance, Balzac inaugurates a new style of by portraying the present. Auerbach maintains that Balzac is one of the founders of modern realism for having seized upon the representation of contemporary life as his own particular task (468). And Lukacs writes that Balzac transcends the historical novel of Walter Scott by passing the portrayal of past to the portrayal of the present as history (83). While Balzac does abandon the overtly historical mode of his romans de jeunesse in La Comedie humaine, certain works, such as the I830 short story Adieu, continue to grapple with the past. Through its use of historical reference, Adieu problematizes the representation of and the integration of the past into the present. Balzac reworks historiography in the nouvelle, and transforms it, with an eye, perhaps, to competing in La comedie humaine with the rival genre of history. In Adieu this preoccupation with history, specifically figured as an episode from Napoleonic Empire, belies the idea that Balzac has moved beyond the past and that its representation is no longer of compelling interest to him. On the most basic level, Balzac uses historical material to construct the plot. But the historical events go beyond mere backdrop or catalyst for the story since Balzac raises issues that the historians of the period themselves are confronting: what kind of relation does the Restoration have to the past, and how can the past be represented, with all the attendant horrors of the Revolutionary and Imperial period? Adieu presents the story of a veteran of Napoleon's Russian Campaign, Philippe de Sucy, who happens upon his beloved Stephanie de Vandieres after having given her up for dead at the crossing of the Berezina years before. She has gone mad, is incapable of recognizing her lover, and unable to utter anything other than a blank and meaningless adieu. The text describes Philippe de Sucy's attempt to get her to recognize him and the ambiguity of his eventual success. In telling this story, Balzac presents a historical narrative, Le Passage de la Beresina, as the traumatic scene at the source of the plot. The account of the crossing of the Berezina River by the remnants of the Grande Armee in 1812 comprises 25 pages of this 65-page text, set off as a separate chapter. This section is striking for the way in which Balzac molds it into a historical set-piece. Balzac's narrative technique recalls historiographical accounts of the event, suggesting that Adieu is explicitly commenting on the genre of history. For example, Balzac oddly shifts the tale into the third person. The story of Philippe's attempt to cross the river with Stephanie is told by Stephanie's uncle and doctor who has heard the tale from someone else. This third-person perspective seems out of place since Philippe is in fact in the best position to tell the tale. It is also curious that the tale is told by Stephanie's uncle as her story, while the narrative is focalized through the character of Philippe. The personal character of the tale becomes further reduced by the Balzacian narrator's elimination of dialogue and digression in the presentation of the narrative: [L'oncle de Stephanie raconta longuement au magistrat l'aventure suivante, dont le recit a ete coordonne et degage des nombreuses digressions que firent le narrateur et le conseiller [d'Albon]. (162) Here, the Balzacian narrator highlights the fact that the situating marks of the discourse have been excised and the narrative has been taken out of the realm of casual storytelling. The opening of the aventure emphasizes as well a wide-angle, distanced view of the episode by describing the movements of the troops and giving an overview of the encampment on the banks of the Berezina. …

Nature-of-Science Literacy in Benchmarks and Standards: Post-Modern/Relativist or Modern/Realist?

The complexity of science is described in the two major science education reform documents in the US: Benchmarks for Science Literacy (1993) and National Science Education Standards (1996). Some have seen them as too ‘postmodern’ while others have charged they are too ‘modern’ in their descriptions of the nature of science.An analysis of the documents shows how each charge might arise. Science's complexity requires one to say that ‘scientific knowledge is tentative or subject to change’ and ‘scientific knowledge is stable'; that ‘change is a persistent feature of science’ and ‘continuity is a persistent feature of science'; that ‘it is normal for scientists to differ with one another’ and ‘scientists work toward consensus'. Both Benchmarks andStandards describe science in terms that sometimes seem to emphasize tentative, local knowledge while at other times emphasizing stable, universal knowledge. Although the overall picture of science presented by each document appears to be one of modern realism, it is not difficult to see how the postmodern relativist could select statements thatpaint science as epistemically equivalent to the social sciences or even the arts and humanities. Implications for science education are discussed.

Medieval Histories and Modern Realism: Yet Another Origin of the Novel

Medieval Histories and Modern Realism: Yet Another Origin of the Novel Nancy F. Partner (bio) I was recently watching the evening news on a local network affiliate in South Florida and was forced to enjoy one of those moments that are like the mental equivalent of a hard eye-blink. The female news anchor was going on in that routine half-emphatic style about some episode of domestic violence that had been suppressed by timely police intervention following a call to 911. I was not listening very attentively, but suddenly I was watching: watching a man and a woman, muffled shouting that I couldn’t hear very well, she retreating, he pushing, my view seemed from somewhere behind them in a smallish living room where the color had oddly drained out of their world as well as the sound, and the picture lurched like amateur camcorder productions, then the police came in at what had to be the front door, and I just had time to wonder, what am I seeing? how can I be seeing this? when the word “simulation” appeared on the screen for a second or two, and my confusion yielded to that increasingly common mixture compounded of “dupe” and “jaded” in equal parts. This happens a lot currently: a news story with enough human interest to broadcast but no visuals, and TV newscast and feature journalism producers, abhorring the unrelieved talking head, edge closer to the resources of fiction—from archival stock footage, through gradations of verisimilitude over to docudrama, reenactment, or so-called simulation—in the Florida instance the crudeness of the hastily contrived footage being a positive advantage. Video [End Page 857] vérité standing in for actual documentary footage, framed by all the visual conventions that mark off the news report from the fictional show, simultaneously enhancing and diluting the cumulative truth-value in the same conflated (or confounded) moment. This technique of incorporating fictions within the confines of a conventional truth-claim genre (here: news) is currently still a violation of the understood protocol for offering factual information in any modern media, and discussions of genre-blurring tend to regard such techniques as stretching the boundaries, pushing against the limits, or otherwise venturing in an outward and uncharted, if not necessarily wise, direction. Only the benefit of a classical or medievalist training enables one to enjoy the mental double take of recognizing ancient and medieval literary conventions strangely taking life again in highly unlikely places. It is difficult enough to deal with the fiction-inside-of-history phenomenon in its own cultural times and places, even with the excellent scholarly guidance available. Important issues of writer/reader relations, truth and representation, authorial intention and reader reception have not been effaced or resolved by appeals to cultural “alterity” and the long stretch of time, but remain sharp challenges for serious scholarship in several premodern fields. 1 I have long since resolved most of my first confusions about this fiction-inside-history phenomenon as it pervades the truth-claim narratives of the Middle Ages, although there will always be something disconcerting about seeing the conventions of medieval history-writing reincarnated in electronic communications on the cusp of the twenty-first century—definitely like a ghost in the machine. 2 Because the framing conventions of the network news, focusing on the news [End Page 858] desk fact-altar, served by its carefully groomed anchor-acolytes who look us in the eye and speak ritually declarative sentences representing events in the shared reality of the external world, and then introject you-are-there scenes and sounds that no recorder was present to see or hear, are indeed the structural and epistemological equivalent of standard medieval historiographical technique. To offer one among thousands of exemplary instances, there is William of Malmesbury, self-conscious inheritor of the tradition of Bede, assuring readers that: “I have always dreaded putting in writing, for transmission to posterity, anything that I did not know to be established as solid fact [quod nescirem solida veritate subsistere].” 3 His histories are scrupulous and earnestly careful works by the standards of the twelfth century, and also quite unremarkably filled with the routine fictions sanctioned by...

Is Feminism Realism Possible? A theory of labial eros and mimesis

This article establishes a correlation between Aristotle's concept of mimesis and the two concepts of modern realism and linear narration, which, with good reason, have been attacked as phallic by many feminist theorists. The correlation is established on the basis of my analysis of the narrative structure of the play Oedipus Rex, and of the reasons why Aristotle might have chosen it as his main example to illustrate his theory in The Poetics. While Aristotle argued that drama is better than lyric and epic, he ironically chose a narrative play to represent his favourite genre to his male students at the Lyceum. This suggests that the example was the most suitable for them to understand. I argue that this accessibility is directly related to the student's gender, their heterosexual acculturation and their masculine embodiedness and eros. Nonetheless, Aristotle established a positive notion of mimesis, which is useful to feminists because it helps us to correlate the reality of our experience with the representations of it that we propose to each other and the external world. Hence, I propose that we use Aristotlelian mimesis as a point of departure to formulate a notion of mimesis based on female embodiedness and eros. A first example to which I point is that of labial mimesis, in which a female duo replaces the phallic hero at the center of the frame of representation. I argue that this duo represents the labia, thus pointing to the possibility of a feminist realism in which the relationship between experience and the intelligible is mediated by female embodiedness and eros, and of developing a new symbolic order based on these new mediations. As I intend to move feminist thought beyond formalist views of realism, I contend that phallic mimesis is only one of the many possible mimeses; not the most sophisticated, and definitely not universal. Indeed, The Poetics constructs it as universal because Aristotle's job was acculturating his students in a system that valorized phallic eros and expected them to become good citizens and procreators. Thus we see that in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, the hero stands erect at the center of the scene of representation and functions as the symbol of the linear, phallic mimesis which is particular but is presented as universal. Feminist readers can look for alternatives to this kind of mimesis, and we can focus on plays where a female duo is at the center of the dramatic structure, and their interaction is the focus of the play. I propose that this mimesis establishes a different relationship between experience and the intelligible for it is based on labial eros. It is a 'labial mimesis' that can be observed in many modern and contemporary films and plays that are realistic for they order experience in a clear, intelligible way, but do so through a mechanism that symbolizes a site of pleasure found in women's bodies. In this alternative to phallic mimesis, the mimetic function is accomplished by the labia, a symbol in which we women can recognize our own eros and interrelatedness.