Use Of Realism Research Articles

The Bodies of August: Photographic Realism and Controversy at the National Air and Space Museum

The Bodies of August: Photographic Realism and Controversy at the National Air and Space Museum Bryan C. Taylor The sight that greeted our eyes was quite beyond what we had expected, because we saw this cloud of boiling dust and debris below us, with this tremendous mushroom on top. And beneath that was hidden the ruins of the city of Hiroshima. — Col. Paul Tibbets, August 6,1945 1 The nation requires anthems, flags. The poet offers discord. Rags. — Salman Rushdie 2 One consistent site of critical scholarship has been "realist" discourse circulating in public affairs. This term includes a variety of modernist, institutional discourses claiming unmediated access to the fundamental truths of social and physical reality. Implicitly, these discourses presume that communication is transparent, and that objective information about phenomena can be unproblematically expressed. Critics typically reject this claim to expose the Real as the product, not the referent, of strategic rhetoric. The self-effacing quality of realism, critics claim, masks its activation of culturally preferred codes for representation (such as the shaky, hand-held camerawork which connotes immediacy and authenticity for the viewers of cinema-verite). These codes reproduce ideological premises concerning what is normal, good, and inevitable (and their opposites) in social life. In their repetition and mutual reinforcement, realist discourses create verisimilitude, not validity .3 Critics have investigated the genres of journalism, literature, ethnography, science, history, and international relations to show how the use of realism authorizes interested accounts, legitimates hegemonic identities, and obscures the contingency of narrative production.4 Frequently, these practices also mobilize competing interests and stimulate resistance among marginalized groups.5 In this essay, I am concerned with the relationship between realism and nuclear weapons. Three themes in this relationship are evoked in the epigraph from Paul Bryan C. Taylor is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 1, No. 3,1998, pp. 331-361 ISSN 1094-8392 332 Rhetoric & Public Affairs Tibbets, pilot of the world's first atomic bombing mission. One theme is the importance of vision for realism. Like all nuclear witnesses, Tibbets was faced with translating the awesome evidence of his senses for his audience (here, journalists requesting an account of his "reactions over the target"). Although the Enola Gay's crew experienced Hiroshima through a variety of senses—one excited crewman believed he could taste the bomb's radiation6—here it is vision that predominates, and vision that establishes Tibbets's complex credibility as an author, witness and survivor of the scene. Another theme in this account involves the excessive quality of the nuclear object. Although Tibbets had been briefed prior to his mission about the destructive force of the weapon, its effects were still "quite beyond" his expectations . His remark indicates the threat posed by nuclear excess to the adequacy of realism for projecting and depicting nuclear events. A final theme involves the tension between presence and absence in nuclear realism. Tibbets's language emphasizes the signs of nuclear explosion: "boiling dust and debris," and the iconic mushroom cloud. Yet in its concluding sentence, the account also acknowledges its limitations. Beyond the presence of these signs lie unseen and unspeakable phenomena. The mushroom cloud is both a sign of the bomb's detonation and a screen that prevents Tibbets from engaging the "hidden" fate of those below. "The ruins" of Hiroshima are a lacuna where his realism falters . Historically, his comments initiate a tradition in which nuclear excess has often remained "beneath" official rhetoric, a surplus of unrealized meaning signaled by its incompleteness. In this essay, I explore the operation of these themes in the related realisms of history , museology, and photography. Specifically, I am concerned with Hiroshima and Nagasaki as events which alternately defy and incite these discourses. Since 1945, nuclear realism has circulated in a variety of genres, such as personal narrative (which claims to transmit the truth of nuclear events through the direct witness of individual speakers), and orthodox historiography (which recovers the "facts" of those events from their encoding in the raw data of documents and testimony).7 These verbal and iconographie discourses do not operate exclusively; they frequently combine and interact in texts such...

A Theological Case for Human Responsibility in Moral Choice

In this article I make a case on religious grounds for an ethics in which human in choice takes center stage. I present my case in the process of contesting arguments in support of a wellestablished alternative religious ethics, one I call moral realism, in which givens of human life for which human beings are not responsible are the centerpiece of decision making. I shall argue, first, that the relevance to ethics of beliefs about reality is no reason in itself to favor over an ethics of human responsibility; second, that the theology behind is flawed in a way that the theology supporting an ethics of human is not; and, third, that the dangers religious ethicists hope to avoid by espousing realism-dangers to the life from positivism, totalitarianism, and a naively optimistic utopianism-are at least as well if not better avoided by a religious ethics of human responsibility. Besides convincing the reader of the greater merits of an ethics of human responsibility, I hope along the way to further a more general agenda-to clarify the use of realism and responsibility as terms of art in religious ethics.

Object naming in aphasics—the lack of effect of context or realism

Three experiments are reported using confrontation naming with aphasic patients. In the first experiment we looked at the effects of the plausibility of the context in object naming; in the second experiment we compared a plausible context with pictures of objects in isolation; in the last experiment we compared the naming of line drawings with that of real objects. In none of these cases were we able to find any effects of the experimental treatments. Such results bear on reasons given for the use of realism in therapy and have relevance for the appropriate form of the model of the underlying processes.