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Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature and Culture
George Levine is one of the most vocal advocates of exchange between disparate schools of thought. He has brought together a remarkable gathering of philosophers, historians, and literary critics. Their essays are based on papers originally given at an international conference on the realism/representation issue. The perspectives are various and even contentious, but they address and illuminate one another, testing the problems of epistemology against history and culture.
- GenresPhilosophy
330 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 1993
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March 20, 2025
I read this book on the recommendation of one of my English professors (although I'm not sure he meant for me to read it cover-to-cover as I did).
I will give a brief synopsis of the text as a whole, followed by a more extensive account of my engagement with each essay.
This book is the product of an interdisciplinary conference on the broad concept of "Realism and Representation" which took place November 10th-12th 1989. The conference was put together by George Levine and the Rutgers Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, an organization which he founded three years prior, and which has since gone on to garner a substantial academic legacy following Levine's retirement. The conference that produced this text enjoyed a rare cohabitation of the sciences and the humanities, owing its bi-modal appeal to its topic's particular significance in both fields. The essays that comprise the text are artificially (meaning, editorially) split into four sections: 1) Epistemology: Science and Reality, 2) Epistemology: Science and Literature, 3) Modernism and Literary Realism, and 4) Science in Culture: Representations.
Knowing the cross-lateral nature of the conference and the audience to which they would be speaking, the authors of these essays frequently appeal to those of other disciplines by blending their theoretical approach or method of demonstration with those of other academic orientations, resulting in a very productive, I think, mixing of bodies of knowledge. Many of the scientific papers appeal to literary analysis in their explanation of their theories, other literary academics study the phenomenology of encountering the aesthetic object, or deploy rigorous models of methods of signification such as the "Semiotic Square." Levine tells us that one of the aims of the conference was to escape the very divisions between disciplines which seem to, or at least attempt to undermine the truths of each other. Levine points out this disciplinary division is reductive to the overall body of knowledge that comprises both by recounting how the discourses of the fields discredit the other: how the sciences might refer to the reduction of facts and evidence to subjective experience in the humanities as similarly reductive to how if someone at a humanities conference posited that their position were objective, they would be labelled a fascist (9). Naturally, this tension is most pronounced in philosophy, with Richard Rorty leading the charge of pragmatist no-nonsense, realist philosophers of science. Levine's introduction, as well as the overall spirit of the conference are generally suspicious of such absolutist positions, and remain relatively uncommitted to hardline arguments in either direction, opting instead to shift discussions of realism to discussions of perception, cognition, interpretation, methodology, and history.
Overall, due to the variety of topics covered, this text is guaranteed to please every philosopher, but only partially. Many of the articles are so deeply steeped in the histories of their disciplines that they are challenging to understand in their entirety, and sadly, not all of them are worth the effort. The good essays soar to such heights that they almost, but not quite, are able to make up for some of the slower ones.
Recommended for: (keywords)
Philosophers of Science, Realism, Zoology, Physics, Biology, Museums, Nature, Literature, Epistemology, Constructivism, Phenomenology, Psychology, Aesthetics, Antirepresentationalism, Language, Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Semiotics, Deconstruction, Medical Science.
1. George Levine - Introduction: "Looking for the Real"
Realism is a subject both new and beaten to death. Levine explains how an anonymous paper reviewer for the conference wrote in the margins "MEGO: My Eyes Glaze Over" in response to someone talking about the subject. Levine cites this insight as a paradoxical case for the urgency to question the very same subject, suggesting it appears to us so mundane that it escapes philosophical inquiry. He then provides an historical account of a selection of major philosophical perspectives that rear up throughout the book, and providing a brief but potent counter-argument to Rorty's aforementioned paper. Levine's great insight here is that there is a preoccupation in both camps (Sciences and Humanities) with knowing, that it is impossible to achieve a position outside of knowledge, in other words, that scholars have a refusal to trust or to believe. This crisis of faith is the very motivation for both the push for objective methods, and culturally sensitive reasoning, they are two types of secularity that seek to drive away the mystical, the poetic, from all thought. Levine is a great theorist, but this paper is more about literally introducing the text, and at this, he does a great job.
2. Katherine Hayles - Constrained Constructivism: Locating Scientific Inquiry in the Theater of Representation
This essay took me the longest. It is about how the process of perception is context dependent, and is simultaneously a process of "self-organization" in terms of organizing a perceiving self in a certain context. Hayles then applies this framework to Derrida's post-structural critique of semiology, positing something called the "semiotic square" created by A.J. Greimas and adapted by Ronald Schleifer. I don't fully understand it, but I think its just positing an internal 4-fold logic to literature (spectrums of congruence and consistency are the axes). She then applies this to Haraway's "Situated Knowledges" to conclude with Haraway that "all knowledge is partial." In sum, a fantastic essay.
3. Paul Churchalnd - On the Problem of Truth and the Immensity of Conceptual Space
Not my thing. It is analytic cognitive philosophy of mind (AI). MEGO.
4. Bas C. Van Fraassen and Jill Sigman - Interpretation in Science and in the Arts
And in Aristotle's words "to say what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not." (74)
Seeks to establish criteria for "faithful representation" (meaning accuracy, even though they directly refute this term, instead they say it means "completeness in some respect that can be required.") To me this is somewhat dubious, although they are a perfect example of the mixing of Philosophy and Science, they address how their interpretive semi-completeness applies to Newtonian systems in a productive way that challenges and ultimately improves their theory by admitting a certain stock of ambiguity that haunts all thought. As is so often the case, this ambiguity leads to poetics, I mean aesthetics, which have a particularly embracing, but fleeting effect, and then we must sadly return to "Does ambiguity have a scientific value?" and so on.
5. Richard W. Miller - Meaningful Projects
A solid and imaginative essay that detects an anti-authoritarian bent to much of contemporary literary theory. Miller explains that this authoritarian perspective suggests that there is a right way and a wrong way to interpret Hamlet for instance, and thus that as readers, we can also interpret how good an author is by sussing out their aim, and identifying how accurate or inaccurate they were in achieving that aim. If you are reading this, you should also be suspicious of such claims as a text being flatly "good" or "bad" and should naturally lean away from anyone trying to say that is how one must interpret literature, thus you and I alike lean towards Miller, and to his utopian and optimistic theory of "decoding" literature. A theory where we assume that an author chooses each word in a text carefully from many candidates, and it is our task, as thoroughly versed theoreticians and historians of literature, to identify, according to the most rigorous standards of our individual practices, to say why the author did so. But here Miller concedes too much ground to the authoritarians. He says literary reading, a type of reading different from other types such as reading the news, emails, goodreads reviews etc, works by discounting the reality of these other types of reading, and even of various other literary readings. Literary readers are then mired in mutually destructive, worse, unproductive falsifications, which lead readers to tend toward a lack of interest in the genre as a whole. I like Miller a lot here. I think he is suggesting that literary research ought to be less focused on uncovering the author's hidden truth in some text, and instead it should be about one's engagement with it.
6. Richard Rorty An Antirepresentationalist View: Comments on Richard miller, van Fraassen/Sigman, and Churchland
By far the most controversial and also the most absolute, in his position, Rorty defends the assailed front of pragmatist philosophy of science, arguing that “the whole idea of truth as accurate representation needs to be abandoned.” (125) Rorty agrees with Donald Davidson in outright denouncing any belief system other than bivalent logic, and in the process he perhaps strategically tosses out the whole notion of representation, which “engenders thoughts of relativism.” (125) Rorty’s puritanical condemnation of relativism is consistent with his position of the absolute truth or falsity of beliefs, a system in which ambiguity and contradiction are considered impossible. Here, Rorty is at his most poetic. He himself informs us in his conclusion that his position is unsatisfactory, and he cannot see it in practice, thereby concluding on a contradiction which does not necessarily undermine his position, but gives it a surprising agility. I think Rorty’s defense is one of the best essays in the collection because of this very inherent tension, which gives it a powerful depth consistent with its central subject. A truly fantastic essay, which I wholeheartedly disagree with.
7. Paisley Livingston - Why Realism Matters
Another fantastic essay which contrasts positivist, or logical empiricist Philosophy of Science with post-structural Literary Theory. Livingston concludes by arguing that we ought to maintain a form of intellectual agility in our critical methodology, an approach that can operate within contradiction and ambiguity, perhaps a surprising echo of Rorty’s position.
8. J. Hillis Miller - Is Literary Theory a Science?
By far the best essay in the collection. Miller [2] relates the narrative realism of literature to a scientifically informed perspective on the phenomenology of perception. Instead of outlining his whole argument, (which I really just did) I will provide some quotes that speak for themselves:
- “The relation between fiction’s performative and constative functions is not a binary opposition but the contradictory inherence of two incompatible linguistic usages.” (155)
- “literary study asserts that perceptions of the world and representations of the world in literature are ‘ideological’ through and through. Language is the primary creator and enforcer of ideological presuppositions” (156-7)
- “The translation is never neutral or innocent. ” (157)
- “Though a realistic novel may be recognized to be a detour away from reality into fiction, a line of words leading into a region of nonexistence, nevertheless, if it is to have value, if it is to be valid, if it is to pass current as genuine for the individual or for the community who ‘consume’ it, it must rise from the real, and return to the real.” (159)
- “But ideology is precisely the force of the unreal within the real.” (167)
- “In realistic fiction of any time or place in our tradition, the projected, groundless phantasm and the genuine reproduction of the real occur in a single indistinguishable operation of narrating language.” (168)
Ultimately, Miller concludes that Philosophy of Science and Literary study arose from the same place (Plato and Aristotle) and it is merely a terminological distinction which has artificially divided them to this day.
9. Robert Scholes - Tlön and Truth: Reflections on Literary Theory and Philosophy
This is one of the stranger essays in the collection in no small part because it comes after such a whirlwind of great chapters. This essay is partly a polemical denouncement of Rorty’s talk, and partly a series of notes following the performance of the talk in which Scholes acknowledges getting kind of mogged by Rorty who points out that he misquoted his use of Donald Davidson. In any case, my chief complaint is that the essay barely talked about Borges’s story at all.
10. Richard Rorty - A Comment on Robert Scholes’s “Tlön and Truth”
I won’t belabor the point, but Rorty gets a little too fiery here and essentially denies all forms of mediated perception, suggesting there is a single objective perspective. In fact, he goes beyond this in a not too subtle attack that feels almost personal: “But do you have any idea what it means for something to be a snake (or anything else, even a Thing-in-Itself) ‘in itself,’ as opposed to being correctly described as a snake (or a Thing-in-itself) by users of English?” (189). This 4 page essay concludes the most bizarre and unproductive span of the book.
11. Gillian Beer - Wave Theory and the Rise of Literary Modernism
By far the most artful and beautiful essay. It engages Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves” with physicists at their most poetic, from de Broglie arguing that the world consists of “ondes fictives” which Jeans claims in “The Mysterious Universe” that “the ethers and their undulations, the waves which form in the universe, are in all probability fictitious…they exist in our minds.”(79). Yes, this is quite the palate cleanser.
12. Elizabeth Deeds Ermath - The Crisis of Realism in Postmodern Time
Another joyful and subtle essay focusing on the inextricability of reading Postmodernist literature and reality. It feels very much indebted to Proust in its pleasant and welcomely melancholic feel of the experience of time spent reading:
- “In short, postmodern temporality makes time itself part of a system of value and emphasis. The sentence read ‘is’ time, and time is a sentence: a defined part of a defined sequence which comes to an end before another sequence, another ‘conjugation’ begins.” (215)
- “Postmodern narrative denies the dissociation of art from life, making the act of reading and interpretation the subject of the book.” (216)
- “In short, reading time is not life neutralized or bracketed, but life in full exercise.” (216)
- “To read postmodern narrative is to participate self-consciously in the invention and deformation of value.” (216)
13. Bruce Robbins - Modernism and Literary Realism: Response
Robbins heroically applauds Gillian Beer, who he turns into Georg Lukacs arguing for naturalism in order to praise her effort to shift the conversation of realism to the way it is defined in different communities, something Beer ascribes to the Victorians (197). He does a very very abridged Marxist reading of realism through Jameson, but neglects the easy connection to Ermath, who would have much to say on the matter.
14. Harriet Ritvo - Zoological Taxonomy and Real Life
This essay marks the beginning of a shift in the text away from the mingling and inter-citational toward the relatively singular and internal essays on different but quite interesting topics. This one discusses the history of taxonomic classification from the 17th-19thC. I laughed audibly in the library when I read the description of the platypus, an animal that confounded every zoologist at the time of its “discovery” “Shaw responded to it with suspicion, wondering whether ‘some arts of deception’ might have been practiced on the first specimen he saw; after he was reassured, he nevertheless described it as having ‘the beak of a Duck engrafted on the head of a quadruped.’…Swainson noted, one of their most striking features, the cloaca, was ‘highly curious, but not well adapted for popular details’ (Natural History 219). They placed it ‘at the termination of the set of links, which led from man downwards, (Smith, Mammalia 80)” (249).
The essay’s primary aim is to assert that scientific order is difficult to perfect. All forms of scientific classification of a period were denounced by the following as “unscientific” with the very quotable conclusion “there was no clear way of distinguishing between the appearance of order, and order itself.” (251)
15. Ludmilla Jordanova - Museums: Representing the Real?
Yes. This essay starts strongly, asserting realism is historically situated, and museums are cultural institutions that facilitate our interaction with cultural objects from different historical moments, in the process helping us to interact with our own cultural moment. It argues how objects in museums are set up to captivate an audience, creating very complex relationships between objects and people very quickly. These relationships are beyond the possibility of Logic (256). Another claim I found extremely interesting is how Jordanova explains the occupation of the scientist: someone who aims to mediate the world through themselves, through their theories. The essay touches on wax sculptures and replicas, making it a perfect companion piece to Umberto Eco’s essay “Travels in Hyperreality.” or Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation.”
16. Simon Schaffer - Augustan Realities: Nature’s Representatives and Their Cultural Resources in the Early Eighteenth Century
A rich history of middle Enlightenment scientific inquiry, which, I must confess, I would have much more to say had I not been anxious to get to the end of the text. I did very much enjoy these points made by the author. The “amnesia of realism” or the case of forgetting the work which goes in to making life-like depictions (279). The way that different medical theories can create alternative realisms. A quote from Foucault about how starting in the 19th Century onward, every scholar became a professor or a director of a laboratory (from Power and Norm).
fin.
I will give a brief synopsis of the text as a whole, followed by a more extensive account of my engagement with each essay.
This book is the product of an interdisciplinary conference on the broad concept of "Realism and Representation" which took place November 10th-12th 1989. The conference was put together by George Levine and the Rutgers Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, an organization which he founded three years prior, and which has since gone on to garner a substantial academic legacy following Levine's retirement. The conference that produced this text enjoyed a rare cohabitation of the sciences and the humanities, owing its bi-modal appeal to its topic's particular significance in both fields. The essays that comprise the text are artificially (meaning, editorially) split into four sections: 1) Epistemology: Science and Reality, 2) Epistemology: Science and Literature, 3) Modernism and Literary Realism, and 4) Science in Culture: Representations.
Knowing the cross-lateral nature of the conference and the audience to which they would be speaking, the authors of these essays frequently appeal to those of other disciplines by blending their theoretical approach or method of demonstration with those of other academic orientations, resulting in a very productive, I think, mixing of bodies of knowledge. Many of the scientific papers appeal to literary analysis in their explanation of their theories, other literary academics study the phenomenology of encountering the aesthetic object, or deploy rigorous models of methods of signification such as the "Semiotic Square." Levine tells us that one of the aims of the conference was to escape the very divisions between disciplines which seem to, or at least attempt to undermine the truths of each other. Levine points out this disciplinary division is reductive to the overall body of knowledge that comprises both by recounting how the discourses of the fields discredit the other: how the sciences might refer to the reduction of facts and evidence to subjective experience in the humanities as similarly reductive to how if someone at a humanities conference posited that their position were objective, they would be labelled a fascist (9). Naturally, this tension is most pronounced in philosophy, with Richard Rorty leading the charge of pragmatist no-nonsense, realist philosophers of science. Levine's introduction, as well as the overall spirit of the conference are generally suspicious of such absolutist positions, and remain relatively uncommitted to hardline arguments in either direction, opting instead to shift discussions of realism to discussions of perception, cognition, interpretation, methodology, and history.
Overall, due to the variety of topics covered, this text is guaranteed to please every philosopher, but only partially. Many of the articles are so deeply steeped in the histories of their disciplines that they are challenging to understand in their entirety, and sadly, not all of them are worth the effort. The good essays soar to such heights that they almost, but not quite, are able to make up for some of the slower ones.
Recommended for: (keywords)
Philosophers of Science, Realism, Zoology, Physics, Biology, Museums, Nature, Literature, Epistemology, Constructivism, Phenomenology, Psychology, Aesthetics, Antirepresentationalism, Language, Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Semiotics, Deconstruction, Medical Science.
1. George Levine - Introduction: "Looking for the Real"
Realism is a subject both new and beaten to death. Levine explains how an anonymous paper reviewer for the conference wrote in the margins "MEGO: My Eyes Glaze Over" in response to someone talking about the subject. Levine cites this insight as a paradoxical case for the urgency to question the very same subject, suggesting it appears to us so mundane that it escapes philosophical inquiry. He then provides an historical account of a selection of major philosophical perspectives that rear up throughout the book, and providing a brief but potent counter-argument to Rorty's aforementioned paper. Levine's great insight here is that there is a preoccupation in both camps (Sciences and Humanities) with knowing, that it is impossible to achieve a position outside of knowledge, in other words, that scholars have a refusal to trust or to believe. This crisis of faith is the very motivation for both the push for objective methods, and culturally sensitive reasoning, they are two types of secularity that seek to drive away the mystical, the poetic, from all thought. Levine is a great theorist, but this paper is more about literally introducing the text, and at this, he does a great job.
2. Katherine Hayles - Constrained Constructivism: Locating Scientific Inquiry in the Theater of Representation
This essay took me the longest. It is about how the process of perception is context dependent, and is simultaneously a process of "self-organization" in terms of organizing a perceiving self in a certain context. Hayles then applies this framework to Derrida's post-structural critique of semiology, positing something called the "semiotic square" created by A.J. Greimas and adapted by Ronald Schleifer. I don't fully understand it, but I think its just positing an internal 4-fold logic to literature (spectrums of congruence and consistency are the axes). She then applies this to Haraway's "Situated Knowledges" to conclude with Haraway that "all knowledge is partial." In sum, a fantastic essay.
3. Paul Churchalnd - On the Problem of Truth and the Immensity of Conceptual Space
Not my thing. It is analytic cognitive philosophy of mind (AI). MEGO.
4. Bas C. Van Fraassen and Jill Sigman - Interpretation in Science and in the Arts
And in Aristotle's words "to say what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not." (74)
Seeks to establish criteria for "faithful representation" (meaning accuracy, even though they directly refute this term, instead they say it means "completeness in some respect that can be required.") To me this is somewhat dubious, although they are a perfect example of the mixing of Philosophy and Science, they address how their interpretive semi-completeness applies to Newtonian systems in a productive way that challenges and ultimately improves their theory by admitting a certain stock of ambiguity that haunts all thought. As is so often the case, this ambiguity leads to poetics, I mean aesthetics, which have a particularly embracing, but fleeting effect, and then we must sadly return to "Does ambiguity have a scientific value?" and so on.
5. Richard W. Miller - Meaningful Projects
A solid and imaginative essay that detects an anti-authoritarian bent to much of contemporary literary theory. Miller explains that this authoritarian perspective suggests that there is a right way and a wrong way to interpret Hamlet for instance, and thus that as readers, we can also interpret how good an author is by sussing out their aim, and identifying how accurate or inaccurate they were in achieving that aim. If you are reading this, you should also be suspicious of such claims as a text being flatly "good" or "bad" and should naturally lean away from anyone trying to say that is how one must interpret literature, thus you and I alike lean towards Miller, and to his utopian and optimistic theory of "decoding" literature. A theory where we assume that an author chooses each word in a text carefully from many candidates, and it is our task, as thoroughly versed theoreticians and historians of literature, to identify, according to the most rigorous standards of our individual practices, to say why the author did so. But here Miller concedes too much ground to the authoritarians. He says literary reading, a type of reading different from other types such as reading the news, emails, goodreads reviews etc, works by discounting the reality of these other types of reading, and even of various other literary readings. Literary readers are then mired in mutually destructive, worse, unproductive falsifications, which lead readers to tend toward a lack of interest in the genre as a whole. I like Miller a lot here. I think he is suggesting that literary research ought to be less focused on uncovering the author's hidden truth in some text, and instead it should be about one's engagement with it.
6. Richard Rorty An Antirepresentationalist View: Comments on Richard miller, van Fraassen/Sigman, and Churchland
By far the most controversial and also the most absolute, in his position, Rorty defends the assailed front of pragmatist philosophy of science, arguing that “the whole idea of truth as accurate representation needs to be abandoned.” (125) Rorty agrees with Donald Davidson in outright denouncing any belief system other than bivalent logic, and in the process he perhaps strategically tosses out the whole notion of representation, which “engenders thoughts of relativism.” (125) Rorty’s puritanical condemnation of relativism is consistent with his position of the absolute truth or falsity of beliefs, a system in which ambiguity and contradiction are considered impossible. Here, Rorty is at his most poetic. He himself informs us in his conclusion that his position is unsatisfactory, and he cannot see it in practice, thereby concluding on a contradiction which does not necessarily undermine his position, but gives it a surprising agility. I think Rorty’s defense is one of the best essays in the collection because of this very inherent tension, which gives it a powerful depth consistent with its central subject. A truly fantastic essay, which I wholeheartedly disagree with.
7. Paisley Livingston - Why Realism Matters
Another fantastic essay which contrasts positivist, or logical empiricist Philosophy of Science with post-structural Literary Theory. Livingston concludes by arguing that we ought to maintain a form of intellectual agility in our critical methodology, an approach that can operate within contradiction and ambiguity, perhaps a surprising echo of Rorty’s position.
8. J. Hillis Miller - Is Literary Theory a Science?
By far the best essay in the collection. Miller [2] relates the narrative realism of literature to a scientifically informed perspective on the phenomenology of perception. Instead of outlining his whole argument, (which I really just did) I will provide some quotes that speak for themselves:
- “The relation between fiction’s performative and constative functions is not a binary opposition but the contradictory inherence of two incompatible linguistic usages.” (155)
- “literary study asserts that perceptions of the world and representations of the world in literature are ‘ideological’ through and through. Language is the primary creator and enforcer of ideological presuppositions” (156-7)
- “The translation is never neutral or innocent. ” (157)
- “Though a realistic novel may be recognized to be a detour away from reality into fiction, a line of words leading into a region of nonexistence, nevertheless, if it is to have value, if it is to be valid, if it is to pass current as genuine for the individual or for the community who ‘consume’ it, it must rise from the real, and return to the real.” (159)
- “But ideology is precisely the force of the unreal within the real.” (167)
- “In realistic fiction of any time or place in our tradition, the projected, groundless phantasm and the genuine reproduction of the real occur in a single indistinguishable operation of narrating language.” (168)
Ultimately, Miller concludes that Philosophy of Science and Literary study arose from the same place (Plato and Aristotle) and it is merely a terminological distinction which has artificially divided them to this day.
9. Robert Scholes - Tlön and Truth: Reflections on Literary Theory and Philosophy
This is one of the stranger essays in the collection in no small part because it comes after such a whirlwind of great chapters. This essay is partly a polemical denouncement of Rorty’s talk, and partly a series of notes following the performance of the talk in which Scholes acknowledges getting kind of mogged by Rorty who points out that he misquoted his use of Donald Davidson. In any case, my chief complaint is that the essay barely talked about Borges’s story at all.
10. Richard Rorty - A Comment on Robert Scholes’s “Tlön and Truth”
I won’t belabor the point, but Rorty gets a little too fiery here and essentially denies all forms of mediated perception, suggesting there is a single objective perspective. In fact, he goes beyond this in a not too subtle attack that feels almost personal: “But do you have any idea what it means for something to be a snake (or anything else, even a Thing-in-Itself) ‘in itself,’ as opposed to being correctly described as a snake (or a Thing-in-itself) by users of English?” (189). This 4 page essay concludes the most bizarre and unproductive span of the book.
11. Gillian Beer - Wave Theory and the Rise of Literary Modernism
By far the most artful and beautiful essay. It engages Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves” with physicists at their most poetic, from de Broglie arguing that the world consists of “ondes fictives” which Jeans claims in “The Mysterious Universe” that “the ethers and their undulations, the waves which form in the universe, are in all probability fictitious…they exist in our minds.”(79). Yes, this is quite the palate cleanser.
12. Elizabeth Deeds Ermath - The Crisis of Realism in Postmodern Time
Another joyful and subtle essay focusing on the inextricability of reading Postmodernist literature and reality. It feels very much indebted to Proust in its pleasant and welcomely melancholic feel of the experience of time spent reading:
- “In short, postmodern temporality makes time itself part of a system of value and emphasis. The sentence read ‘is’ time, and time is a sentence: a defined part of a defined sequence which comes to an end before another sequence, another ‘conjugation’ begins.” (215)
- “Postmodern narrative denies the dissociation of art from life, making the act of reading and interpretation the subject of the book.” (216)
- “In short, reading time is not life neutralized or bracketed, but life in full exercise.” (216)
- “To read postmodern narrative is to participate self-consciously in the invention and deformation of value.” (216)
13. Bruce Robbins - Modernism and Literary Realism: Response
Robbins heroically applauds Gillian Beer, who he turns into Georg Lukacs arguing for naturalism in order to praise her effort to shift the conversation of realism to the way it is defined in different communities, something Beer ascribes to the Victorians (197). He does a very very abridged Marxist reading of realism through Jameson, but neglects the easy connection to Ermath, who would have much to say on the matter.
14. Harriet Ritvo - Zoological Taxonomy and Real Life
This essay marks the beginning of a shift in the text away from the mingling and inter-citational toward the relatively singular and internal essays on different but quite interesting topics. This one discusses the history of taxonomic classification from the 17th-19thC. I laughed audibly in the library when I read the description of the platypus, an animal that confounded every zoologist at the time of its “discovery” “Shaw responded to it with suspicion, wondering whether ‘some arts of deception’ might have been practiced on the first specimen he saw; after he was reassured, he nevertheless described it as having ‘the beak of a Duck engrafted on the head of a quadruped.’…Swainson noted, one of their most striking features, the cloaca, was ‘highly curious, but not well adapted for popular details’ (Natural History 219). They placed it ‘at the termination of the set of links, which led from man downwards, (Smith, Mammalia 80)” (249).
The essay’s primary aim is to assert that scientific order is difficult to perfect. All forms of scientific classification of a period were denounced by the following as “unscientific” with the very quotable conclusion “there was no clear way of distinguishing between the appearance of order, and order itself.” (251)
15. Ludmilla Jordanova - Museums: Representing the Real?
Yes. This essay starts strongly, asserting realism is historically situated, and museums are cultural institutions that facilitate our interaction with cultural objects from different historical moments, in the process helping us to interact with our own cultural moment. It argues how objects in museums are set up to captivate an audience, creating very complex relationships between objects and people very quickly. These relationships are beyond the possibility of Logic (256). Another claim I found extremely interesting is how Jordanova explains the occupation of the scientist: someone who aims to mediate the world through themselves, through their theories. The essay touches on wax sculptures and replicas, making it a perfect companion piece to Umberto Eco’s essay “Travels in Hyperreality.” or Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation.”
16. Simon Schaffer - Augustan Realities: Nature’s Representatives and Their Cultural Resources in the Early Eighteenth Century
A rich history of middle Enlightenment scientific inquiry, which, I must confess, I would have much more to say had I not been anxious to get to the end of the text. I did very much enjoy these points made by the author. The “amnesia of realism” or the case of forgetting the work which goes in to making life-like depictions (279). The way that different medical theories can create alternative realisms. A quote from Foucault about how starting in the 19th Century onward, every scholar became a professor or a director of a laboratory (from Power and Norm).
fin.
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