Definition of realism

Deffenition of :
Realism :
Realism ; in the artsmay be generally defined as the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality, and avoiding artistic conventions, implausible, exotic and supernatural elements.
In its most specific sense, Realism was an artistic movement that began in France in the 1850s, after the 1848 Revolution. Realists rejected Romanticism, which had dominated French literature and art since the late 18th century. Realism revolted against the exotic subject matter and exaggerated emotionalism and drama of the Romantic movement. Instead it sought to portray real and typical contemporary people and situations with truth and accuracy, and not avoiding unpleasant or sordid aspects of life. Realist works depicted people of all classes in situations that arise in ordinary life, and often reflected the changes wrought by the Industrialand Commercial Revolutions. The popularity of such 'realistic' works grew with the introduction of photography — a new visual source that created a desire for people to produce representations which look “objectively real.”
More generally, realist works of art are those that, in revealing a truth, may emphasize the ugly or sordid, such as works of social realism, regionalism, or Kitchen sink realism. The movement even managed to impact on opera, where it is called Verismo, with contemporary working-class heroines such as Carmen, who works in a cigarette factory, and Mimi in La bohème.
Significant works
Precursors and influences
- The works of Giovanni Verga
- Poetic realism
- 1860 (Alessandro Blasetti, 1934)
- An Inn in Tokyo (Yasujirō Ozu, 1935)
- Toni (Jean Renoir, 1935)
- La nave bianca (Roberto Rossellini, 1941)
- Aniki-Bóbó (Manoel de Oliveira, 1942)
- Four Steps in the Clouds (Alessandro Blasetti, 1942)
- People of the Po Valley (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1947) - filmed in 1943.
Main works
- Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, 1942)
- Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945)
- Shoeshine (Vittorio De Sica, 1946)
- Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, 1946)
- Germany, Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948)
- The Bicycle Thief (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)
- The Earth Trembles (Luchino Visconti, 1948)
- Bitter Rice (Giuseppe De Santis, 1949)
- Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, 1950)
- Bellissima (Luchino Visconti, 1951)
- Miracle in Milan (Vittorio De Sica, 1951)
- Rome 11:00 (Giuseppe De Santis, 1952)
- Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952) — filmed in 1951, but released in 1952. Many film historians date the end of the neorealist movement with the public attacks on the film.
Classicism is a force which is often present in post-medieval European and European influenced traditions; however, some periods felt themselves more connected to the classical ideals than others, particularly the Age of Enlightenment.
Famous writers :
- Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC), highly influential grammarian
- Titus Pomponius Atticus (112/109 – 35/32), publisher and correspondent of Cicero
- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC), orator, philosopher, correspondent, whose works define golden Latin prose and are used in Latin curricula beyond the elementary level
- Servius Sulpicius Rufus (106–43 BC), jurist, poet
- Decimus Laberius (105–43 BC), writer of mimes
- Marcus Furius Bibaculus (1st century BC), writer of ludicra
- Gaius Julius Caesar (103–44 BC), general, historian
- Gaius Oppius (1st century BC), secretary to Julius Caesar, probable author under Caesar's name
- Gaius Matius (1st century BC), public figure, correspondent with Cicero
- Cornelius Nepos (100–24 BC), biographer
- Publilius Syrus (1st century BC), writer of mimes and maxims
- Quintus Cornificius (1st century BC), public figure and writer on rhetoric
- Titus Lucretius Carus (Lucretius; 94–50 BC), poet, philosopher
- Publius Nigidius Figulus (98–45 BC), public officer, grammarian
- Aulus Hirtius (90–43 BC), public officer, military historian
- Gaius Helvius Cinna (1st century BC), poet
- Marcus Caelius Rufus (87–48 BC), orator, correspondent with Cicero
- Gaius Sallustius Crispus (86–34 BC), historian
- Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis (Cato the Younger; 95–46 BC), orator
- Publius Valerius Cato (1st century BC), poet, grammarian
- Gaius Valerius Catullus (Catullus; 84–54 BC), poet
- Gaius Licinius Macer Calvus (82–47 BC), orator, poet
Augustan
The Golden Age is divided by the assassination of Julius Caesar. In the wars that followed the Republican generation of literary men was lost, as most of them had taken the losing side; Marcus Tullius Cicero was beheaded in the street as he enquired from his litter what the disturbance was. They were replaced by a new generation that had grown up and been educated under the old and were now to make their mark under the watchful eye of the new emperor. As the demand for great orators was more or less over,[15] the talent shifted emphasis to poetry. Other than the historian Livy, the most remarkable writers of the period were the poets Vergil, Horace, and Ovid. Although Augustus evidenced some toleration to republican sympathizers, he exiled Ovid, and imperial tolerance ended with the continuance of the Julio-Claudian Dynasty.Augustan writers include:
- Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil, spelled also as Vergil; 70–19 BC),
- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace; 65–8 BC), known for lyric poetry and satires
- Sextus Aurelius Propertius (50–15 BC), poet
- Albius Tibullus (54–19 BC), elegiac poet
- Titus Livius (Livy; 64 BC – 12 AD), historian
- Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid) (43 BC – 18 AD), poet
- Grattius Faliscus, a contemporary of Ovid), poet
- Marcus Manilius (1st century BC & AD), astrologer, poet
- Gaius Julius Hyginus (64 BC – 17 AD), librarian, poet, mythographer
- Marcus Verrius Flaccus (55 BC – 20 AD), grammarian, philologist, calendrist
- Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (80-70 BC — after 15 BC), engineer, architect
- Marcus Antistius Labeo (d. 10 or 11 AD), jurist, philologist
- Lucius Cestius Pius (1st century BC & AD), Latin educator
- Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus (1st century BC), historian, naturalist
- Marcus Porcius Latro (1st century BC), rhetorician
- Gaius Valgius Rufus (consul 12 BC), poet
Romanticism
Eugène Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus, 1827, taking its Orientalist subject from a play by Lord Byron
Romanticism (or the Romantic era/Period) : was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, it was also a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education and the natural sciences. Its effect on politics was considerable and complex; while for much of the peak Romantic period it was associated with liberalism and radicalism, in the long term its effect on the growth of nationalism was probably more significant.
The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimityof untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk artand ancient custom to something noble, made spontaneity a desirable characteristic (as in the musical impromptu), and argued for a "natural" epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language and customary usage. Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicistideal models to elevate a revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant in modes more authentic than Rococochinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to escape.
Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which prized intuition and emotion over Enlightenment rationalism, the ideologies and events of the French Revolution laid the background from which both Romanticism and the Counter-Enlightenment emerged. The confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities; indeed, in the second half of the 19th century, "Realism" was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism. Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as heroic individualists and artists, whose pioneering examples would elevate society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority, which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a Zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas.
In the United States, romantic Gothic literature made an early appearance with Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) and Rip Van Winkle (1819), followed from 1823 onwards by the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper, with their emphasis on heroic simplicity and their fervent landscape descriptions of an already-exotic mythicized frontier peopled by "noble savages", similar to the philosophical theory of Rousseau, exemplified by Uncas, from The Last of the Mohicans. There are picturesque "local color" elements in Washington Irving's essays and especially his travel books. Edgar Allan Poe's tales of the macabre and his balladic poetry were more influential in France than at home, but the romantic American novel developed fully with the atmosphere and melodrama of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850). Later Transcendentalist writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson still show elements of its influence and imagination, as does the romantic realism of Walt Whitman. The poetry of Emily Dickinson—nearly unread in her own time—and Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick can be taken as epitomes of American Romantic literature. By the 1880s, however, psychological and social realism were competing with Romanticism in the novel.
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement in the arts, its set of cultural tendencies and associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western societyin the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In particular the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by the horror of World War I, were among the factors that shaped Modernism. Related terms are modern, modernist, contemporary, and postmodern.
In art, Modernism explicitly rejects the ideology of realism and makes use of the works of the past, through the application of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody in new forms. Modernism also rejects the lingering certainty of Enlightenmentthinking, as well as the idea of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator.
In general, the term Modernism encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social, and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it new!" was paradigmatic of the movement's approach towards the obsolete. Another paradigmatic exhortation was articulated by philosopher and composer Theodor Adorno, who, in the 1940s, challenged conventional surface coherence, and appearance of harmony typical of the rationality of Enlightenment thinking. A salient characteristic of Modernism is self-consciousness. This self-consciousness often led to experiments with form and work that draws attention to the processes and materials used (and to the further tendency of abstraction). The modernist movement, at the beginning of the 20th century, marked the first time that the term avant-garde, with which the movement was labeled until the word "modernism" prevailed, was used for the arts (rather than in its original military and political context).
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