Objectivism
Objectivism is a literary movement that emerged in the 20th century, emphasizing the use of precise language and objective reality in writing. It promotes the idea that art should reflect the world as it is, without subjective interpretation or emotional bias. Objectivist writers strive for clarity, directness, and a focus on concrete details in their work.
4 Key excerpts on "Objectivism"
eBook - ePubThe Poverty of Structuralism
Literature and Structuralist Theory
- Leonard Jackson(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...CHAPTER EIGHT Towards a Realist Theory of Literature Natural and Social Science, Objective Literary History and Functional Literary Values SUMMARY Recent theory often generalises its critical discourses – feminist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-metaphysical etc. – into anti-epistemological claims: e.g. that ‘truth’ is something produced in relations of power, or that meaning is a product of interpretation. This can form the basis of broad philosophical attacks on the concepts of impersonal rationality, objectivity and truth. Thus post-modernists appear to reject the very notion of having general theories. In literary study a certain relativism is now taken for granted, and the notion that there might be objective phenomena to be explained seems strange, and even oppressive. This chapter does not confront post-modernism as such, nor argues against the discourses listed above. But it does attack relativism. This chapter takes as central to literary theory the problem of explaining why millions of people attach almost exactly the same meaning to a text: every reader of Ian Fleming thinking the James Bond books are spy stories, not text-books of electrochemistry, for example. It takes as marginal though not non-existent or unimportant – the various uncertainties of interpretation, the variety of evaluative judgements, and the infinite range of ways in which other texts can be read into the one under consideration. It argues for an approach to literary theory that is constructive and explanatory – and in that sense ‘scientific’ – and less concerned with the antimetaphysics of indeterminacy. It sets that approach in a realist philosophical framework...
eBook - ePub- W. Scott Howard, Broc Rossell(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- University Of Iowa Press(Publisher)
...In fact, one of the enduring characteristics of Objectivism is a resilient resistance to closure and containment vis-à-vis existing literary practices or schools. As a result, Objectivism makes straightforward definition difficult because it emerged and developed within a context of energetic and generative disagreements, rather than as a ‘movement’ per se. Ruth Jennison argues that the Objectivist poets inherited from first-generation modernists (Joyce, Woolf, Pound, H. D., Yeats, Moore, Eliot, etc.) experimental breaks “with prior systems of representation” and strove to link those disjunctions with “a futurally pointed content of revolutionary politics”—expropriating their predecessors’ formal tools “to announce a rupture not with the past but into the future.” 6 “‘ No myths might be the Objectivist motto,’” writes Mark Scroggins (after Hugh Kenner). 7 So, how to make sense of this jumble of (dis)interests and values for this so-called poetics without a movement? If Objectivism may be defined generally as a poetics and praxis that prioritizes disinterested “seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist,” 8 to quote Zukofsky’s classic line, that short answer doesn’t give away what follows in this introduction. The Objectivists suggested we establish those priorities ourselves, that we not look to their statements as explanations, and that we even challenge the idea of a specific ‘Objectivist’ school to which they were aligned or which they countered. As a way of embodying the Marxist and communist politics they generally espoused, they shared ownership of and responsibility for literary production with their peers and rejected the notion of genealogical literary influence. One of the interesting results of the rejection of literary sequentialism is that such disjunctive and oppositional practices became highly influential in their own right...
eBook - ePub- Frederic Neyrat(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...6 Materialism and realism On literary realism, naturalism, and objectivist poetry Literature and the existential profusion of the real We would like to hunt, catch, and brandish reality like a trophy, in saying: “Look, this is reality, take a picture.” But reality’s materiality is startling, as soon as we think we have caught it, the prey vanishes like an illusion, escapes like a ghost, or changes its form and reveals itself as completely different from what the hunter thought it was. Reality is so unreal sometimes, that we need a materialism able to be commensurate to the incommensurability, to the excessiveness of reality. To identify what I shall call in this chapter a materialism of the excess, I will show that literature offers an account of reality that does not exactly fit what speculative realism and object-oriented ontology argue: Reality, literature demonstrates, cannot be reduced to an object, reality divides objects, overwhelms them, revealing in the objects an obscure insideness striving to escape any objective limitations. To show this, I decided to study what might be seen, wrongly, as the three literary genres the closest to speculative realism and object-oriented ontology: Literary realism, naturalism, and objectivist poetry. The paradox is that the more realist literature and naturalist novels try to depict reality, the more reality reveals an excess that cannot be ontologically grasped; the more poetry strives to identify an object, the more the object rebels and claims its multiple, enigmatic relationship with the world...
eBook - ePub- George Lakoff, Mark Johnson(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
...Each defines itself in opposition to the other and sees the other as the enemy. Objectivism takes as its allies scientific truth, rationality, precision, fairness, and impartiality. Subjectivism takes as its allies the emotions, intuitive insight, imagination, humaneness, art, and a “higher” truth. Each is master in its own realm and views its realm as the better of the two. They coexist, but in separate domains. Each of us has a realm in his life where it is appropriate to be objective and a realm where it is appropriate to be subjective. The portions of our lives governed by Objectivism and subjectivism vary greatly from person to person and from culture to culture. Some of us even attempt to live our entire lives totally by one myth or the other. In Western culture as a whole, Objectivism is by far the greater potentate, claiming to rule, at least nominally, the realms of science, law, government, journalism, morality, business, economics, and scholarship. But, as we have argued, Objectivism is a myth. Since the time of the Greeks, there has been in Western culture a tension between truth, on the one hand, and art, on the other, with art viewed as illusion and allied, via its link with poetry and theater, to the tradition of persuasive public oratory. Plato viewed poetry and rhetoric with suspicion and banned poetry from his utopian Republic because it gives no truth of its own, stirs up the emotions, and thereby blinds mankind to the real truth. Plato, typical of persuasive writers, stated his view that truth is absolute and art mere illusion by the use of a powerful rhetorical device, his Allegory of the Cave. To this day, his metaphors dominate Western philosophy, providing subtle and elegant expression for his view that truth is absolute. Aristotle, on the other hand, saw poetry as having a positive value: “It is a great thing, indeed, to make proper use of the poetic forms,. ....
