realism

1. An inclination toward literal truth and pragmatism.
2. The representation in art or literature of objects, actions, or social conditions as they actually are, without idealization or presentation in abstract form.
3. Philosophy.
   1. The scholastic doctrine, opposed to nominalism, that universals exist independently of their being thought.
   2. The modern philosophical doctrine, opposed to idealism, that physical objects exist independently of their being perceived.

An approach to scientific enquiry that sees the world as made up of events, together with mechanisms and structures. Structures intrinsically possess causal powers and liabilities, but whether or not they are set in motion is contingent, that is, depending on the circumstances. Realism attempts to unravel the causal chains of specific events within specific structures. Realism differs from empiricism and positivism because it is multi-tiered.

Movement in mid- to late 19th-century art, in which an attempt was made to create objective representations of the external world based on the impartial observation of contemporary life. Realism was consciously democratic, including in its subject-matter and audience activities and social classes previously considered unworthy of representation in high art. The most coherent development of Realism was in French painting, where it centred on the work of GUSTAVE COURBET, who used the word r?alisme as the title for a manifesto that accompanied an exhibition of his works in 1855. Though its influence extended into the 20th century its later manifestations are usually labelled as SOCIAL REALISM.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Realism is the label given to the traditional orthodoxy in political approaches to understanding international relations. It is conventional to counterpose realist thinking to idealism. Realism dominated the discipline in the decades following the Second World War. It claims an intellectual heritage going back to Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau. Post-war realism was dominated by the writing of E. H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, and John Herz. A revival under the label neorealism started in the late 1970s led by the work of Kenneth N. Waltz. Realism in all of its forms emphasizes the continuities of the human condition, particularly at the international level. Classical realists tended to find the source of these continuities in the permanence of human nature as reflected in the political construction of states. Neorealists find them in the anarchic structure of the international system, which they see as a historically enduring force that shapes the behaviour and construction of states. On the basis of these continuities, realists see power as the driving force in all political life. Their analytical focus is on the group rather than on the individual, and because it commands power most effectively, the key human group is the state, whether understood as tribe, city-state, empire, or nation-state. Because relations between states are power-driven, and because the anarchic structure provides few constraints on the pursuit of power, realism emphasizes the competitive and conflictual side of international relations. The idea of the balance of power is one of the most long-standing analytical tools of realism, and provides the link between the study of power politics generally, and the more specific analysis of military relations in strategic studies.

Realist analysis tends to model the state as a unitary rational actor operating under conditions of uncertainty and imperfect information. In this both realism and neorealism borrow consciously from microeconomic theory, seeing states as analogous to firms, anarchic structure as analogous to market structure, and power as analogous to utility.

From the late 1960s onwards it began to be argued and accepted that the methodology and theory associated with classical realism were anachronistic. Behaviouralists argued that the work of classical realists did not satisfy the canons of scientific investigation. There was a vigorous academic assault coming from those concerned with interdependence, political economy, and transnational relations. This included attacks on the centrality of the state and military power in realist thinking, an accusation that realism was unable to deal with either the issues or the character of international politics in an interdependent world, and a denunciation of the logic and the morality of realism's normative bias towards conflictual assumptions.

Neorealism reasserted the logic of power politics on firmer foundations, exposing the partiality of the interdependence view of international relations, and reaffirming the primacy of American power in the international system. It was much aided by the onset of the second Cold War in 1979, which caught off balance advocates of interdependence and transnationalism, who were still confidently generating explanations premised on the progressive redundancy of force in international relations and the fragmentation of state power. Increasingly, neorealist and neoliberal thinking merged in pursuit of rational choice theory, sharing an opposition to the rising challenge from constructivism.

— Barry Buzan

realism, a mode of writing that gives the impression of recording or ‘reflecting’ faithfully an actual way of life. The term refers, sometimes confusingly, both to a literary method based on detailed accuracy of description (i.e. verisimilitude) and to a more general attitude that rejects idealization, escapism, and other extravagant qualities of romance in favour of recognizing soberly the actual problems of life. Modern criticism frequently insists that realism is not a direct or simple reproduction of reality (a ‘slice of life’) but a system of conventions producing a lifelike illusion of some ‘real’ world outside the text, by processes of selection, exclusion, description, and manners of addressing the reader. In its methods and attitudes, realism may be found as an element in many kinds of writing prior to the 19th century (e.g. in Chaucer or Defoe, in their different ways); but as a dominant literary trend it is associated chiefly with the 19th‐century novel of middle‐ or lower‐class life, in which the problems of ordinary people in unremarkable circumstances are rendered with close attention to the details of physical setting and to the complexities of social life. The outstanding works of realism in 19th‐century fiction include Honoré de Balzac's Illusions perdues (1837–43), Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–2). In France, a self‐consciously realist school announced itself in 1857 with the publication of Champfleury's Le Réalisme, but the term normally refers to the general convention rather than to this barely significant group. In the work of some novelists, realism passes over into the movement of naturalism, in which sociological investigation and determinist views of human behaviour predominate. Realism also established itself as an important tradition in the theatre in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in the work of Henrik Ibsen, Bernard Shaw, and others; and it remains a standard convention of film and television drama. Despite the radical attempts of modernism to displace the realist emphasis on external reality (notably in the movements of expressionism and surrealism), realism survived as a major current within 20th‐century fiction, sometimes under the label of neo‐realism. For a fuller account, consult Damian Grant, Realism (1970).

Art

Literature

Philosophy

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The term has complex meanings, partly because of the history of its use in philosophy and art. A strand of Western thought going back to Plato considers the visible word not reality, but mere appearances which tell us nothing of the reality of universal forms and ideas. These cannot be apprehended through our senses, but only via rational thought. Walter Benjamin, for example, quoted Bertolt Brecht's antirealist argument: ‘less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works … tells us next to nothing about [it].’

The depiction of visible reality, however, had acquired an enhanced status by the 1840s, at the inception of the artistic and literary movement known as realism, as both artists and scientists had come to value the empirical study of nature. It was partly this interest in accurate visual records that led to the use of the camera obscura as an aid to drawing; and the development of photography as a way of fixing its image, bypassing the inaccuracies of the human hand. As an art movement, realism aimed to represent the visible world truthfully, by observing contemporary life and depicting ordinary people and situations, rather than idealized heroes and allegorical stories.

The realist connotations of the photographic image have been enhanced by the significance of the camera obscura, which has been used, in a philosophical tradition going back to Descartes, as a metaphor for rational knowledge, detached from the subjective and inaccurate nature of sense perception. The idea of the camera as an instrument of knowledge is a powerful assumption underlying many photographic practices, from 19th-century studies of criminality and mental illness to 20th-century documentarism; even if these are based on a subtler notion of correspondence between visual and social realities when mediated by the experience and integrity of the photographer. Recent histories and theories of photographic meaning have emphasized the ideological nature of this model of vision.

In a different register, Jonathan Crary has argued that by the 19th century the camera was no longer understood as a model of objective knowledge, but had become part of a whole series of optical toys devised to stimulate subjective and embodied vision, now understood as an active and creative element of visual experience. Following Crary, Geoffrey Batchen argues that early photographers were motivated by romantic desires for traces of nature, as much as the need to know, classify, and possess it.

Dr Johnson would doubtless have dismissed such approaches as philosophical hair-splitting. Photographs, after all, seem to mirror the world, or at least a fragment of it in space and time. But the photographer's choices—lens, viewpoint, framing, timing—intervene between the object and its image, even when these seem natural or unwittingly made, as in snapshot photographs. Realist images are as much constructed as the most complex studio set; their illusion of transparency enhances their ability to construct and confirm conceptions of reality itself.

— Patrizia di Bello

Bibliography

• Nochlin, L., Realism (1971).
• Benjamin, W., One Way Street and Other Writings (1979).
• Tagg, J., The Burden of Representation (1988).
• Crary, J., Techniques of the Observer (1990).
• Batchen, G., Burning with Desire (1997)

[For the use of the term in medieval philosophy, see Nominalists]. Originally a philosophical term opposed to idealism, realism gained currency as an aesthetic category when it appeared in art criticism in the mid-1840s. It is particularly associated with Courbet, who called for the ‘sincerity’ and ‘truth’ of art in the context of a socialist politics, and declared in 1848 that he would paint only modern and popular subject-matter. Un enterrement à Ornans (1850) and L'Atelier du peintre (1855) were polemical paintings, and his 1855 exhibition of paintings refused by the official salons was entitled ‘Le Réalisme’. Champfleury, who wrote the exhibition catalogue, transposed Courbet's ideas to literature in Le Réalisme, a collection of essays serving as a manifesto. Louis Duranty joined in with a journal, Réalisme, which ran to six issues in 1856 and 1857. His first attempt at a self-conscious Realist novel was Le Malheur d'Henriette Gérard (1860). Courbet, Champfleury, and Duranty are the three figures who espoused the term ‘Realism’ deliberately. Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary was first published in 1856, despised the polemics as well as the implied aesthetics, and vigorously resisted the application of the term to his work.

The problem arises here of whether Realism is a literary movement, precisely located in history (coming after Romanticism, preceding Naturalism and modernism, etc.), or whether it is simply an aesthetic label which escapes periodization and can be applied anachronistically. Even then, the value-judgements entailed in the term vary wildly and should doubtless be accounted for historically. Seen as a literary movement, Realism should probably be restricted to the period from the late 1840s to the mid-1860s. It implies a theory of subject-matter (that content should focus on ordinary, everyday lives, preferably lower-class) and a theory of documentation (i.e. a quasi-journalistic recourse to reliable sources).

However, 20th-c. critics tend to apply the term to a broader range of 19th-c. novelists, of whom the canonical examples tend to be Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola. Erich Auerbach, who traces the history of mimesis in Western literature, attributes to 19th-c. France the key role in the rise of modern realism, stressing the complete break with classical prescriptions about appropriate styles and genres for the portrayal of everyday life. Realism chooses random people and events to illustrate general historical trends, and ordinary, low-class people earn the right to problematic and even tragic representation. The reality in which they are embedded is a strictly material one: it is political, social, . economic, and constantly evolving. George Lukács, who wanted to reroute the 20th-c. novel back to the path of 19th-c. Realism, similarly stresses the representation of ‘total’ human beings in ‘total’ surroundings that change in history. Lukács especially admired Balzac for linking his psychological and moral analyses to economic determinations and to political history; he felt he had achieved this through the construction of characters as artificial but historically accurate types. Though Lukács's belief that the ideal realist character will behave independently of its creator may seem misguided, his stress on typification nevertheless moves the debate into the question of the technical, aesthetic means by which realist writing might be achieved.

French Realism (and Balzac in particular) had a particularly bad press in the period of the Nouveau Roman, when it was equated with a naïve belief in the transparency of language as the unproblematic vehicle of representations of the real world. The Structuralist insistence on the non-referentiality of language fed into this view. However, Barthes's famous reading of a Balzac story in S/Z (1970) lifted this block on serious work on realism. On the one hand his stress on the intertextuality of the codes of realist writing did indeed seem to dissolve the solid presence of 19th-c. France in the novels of the period. On the other hand, Barthes provided a thorough and insightful analysis of the conventions and devices whereby a realist text creates a representation of a recognizable reality. In a neat reversal of its original aesthetics, realism can be studied as a particular sort of discourse—one which achieves its effects by making plot details subservient to its own requirements.

— Diana Knight

Bibliography

• G. Lukács, Studies in European Realism (trs. E. Bone, 1950)
• E. Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (trs. W. R. Trask, 1953)
• C. Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis (1986)
• L. Furst (ed.), Realism (1992)

An attempt to make art and literature resemble life. Realist painters and writers take their subjects from the world around them (instead of from idealized subjects, such as figures in mythology or folklore) and try to represent them in a lifelike manner.

The endeavor to portray an accurate representation of nature and real life without idealization.

n.

The art of depicting nature as it is seem by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm.

Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet, 1854. Realistic painting by Gustave Courbet.

Realism in the visual arts and literature is the depiction of subjects as they appear in everyday life, without embellishment or interpretation. The term also describes works of art which, in revealing a truth, may emphasize the ugly or sordid.

Realism often refers to the artistic movement, which began in France in the 1850s. The popularity of realism grew with the introduction of photography - a new visual source that created a desire for people to produce things that look “objectively real”. Realists positioned themselves against romanticism, a genre dominating French literature and artwork in the late 18th and early 19th century. Undistorted by personal bias, Realism believed in the ideology of objective reality and revolted against exaggerated emotionalism. Truth and accuracy became the goals of many Realists.

Contents 1 Visual arts 2 Theatre 3 Cinema 4 Gallery 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

Visual arts

Main article: Realism (visual arts)

Realists render everyday characters, situations, dilemmas, and objects, all in a "true-to-life" manner. Realists tend to discard theatrical drama, lofty subjects and classical forms of art in favor of commonplace themes.

Theatre

Main article: Realism (theatre)

The achievement of realism in theatre was to direct attention to the physical and philosophic problems of ordinary existence, both socially and psychologically. In plays of this mode people emerge as victims of forces larger than themselves, as individuals confronted with a rapidly accelerating world.^[1] These pioneering playwrights were unafraid to present their characters as ordinary, impotent, and unable to arrive at answers to their predicaments. This type of art represents what we see with our human eyes.

Cinema

See also: Neorealism (art), Poetic realism, and Socialist realism

Italian neorealism was a cinematic movement incorporating elements of realism that developed in post-WWII Italy. Notable Neorealists included Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, and Roberto Rossellini.

Gallery

Gustave Courbet, Stone-Breakers, 1849.	Wilhelm Oswald Gustav Achenbach, Abendstimmung in der Campagna, 1850.	John Singer Sargent, Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), 1884.	Eilif Peterssen, The salmon fisher, 1889.
Ilya Repin, They did not Expect Him, 1884-1888.	Otakar Švec, Josif Stalin's memorial in Prague, 1955-1962.

See also

• Literary realism
• Simulated reality
• Chanson réaliste (realist song), a style of music performed in France primarily from the 1880s until the end of World War II

References

1. ^ Simard, Rodney. Postmodern Drama: Contemporary Playwrights in America and Britain. New York: UP of America, 1984.

• West, Shearer (1996). The Bullfinch Guide to Art. UK: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. ISBN 0-8212-2137-X. 

External links

• Article on American literary realism at the Literary Movements site

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - realisme, realitetssans, virkelighedssans

Nederlands (Dutch)
realisme

Français (French)
n. - réalisme

Deutsch (German)
n. - Realismus

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ρεαλισμός, (φιλοσ.) πραγματισμός, πραγματοκρατία

Italiano (Italian)
realismo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - realismo (m)

Русский (Russian)
реализм

Español (Spanish)
n. - realismo, sentido común

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - realism

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
现实性, 现实主义, 写实主义, 现实态度, 注重实际的倾向, 真实性

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 現實性, 現實主義, 寫實主義, 現實態度, 注重實際的傾向, 真實性

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 사실주의, 현실주의, 실재론

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 現実主義, 写実主義, リアリズム, 実在論

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) الواقعيه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮מציאותיות, מעשיות, ממשנות, ריאליזם, נאמנות למציאות באמנות, ההשקפה שהעולם הוא מציאותי ואינו תלוי בהכרתנו הפנימית ובמושגינו (פילוסופיה)‬

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