Realism Books

He was 36 before he was first interviewed, and it took awhile for the logrolling to really get going, but then in his fifties and sixties interviewers came to him in droves. MARK TWAIN: THE COMPLETE INTERVIEWS is an amazing publishing project, I leave the details to the specialists. All the general public needs to know is that it is the funniest book to be published this year, and pound for pound, dollar for dollar, by far the best bargain of the year even at seventy-five dollars a pop. I advise you to stock up on this book for Christmas presents or what have you, or even just to see you through the long hard winter with a little bit of jollification at your fingertips.

Along the way, we meet not only Twain but dozens of newspapermen (and women) who wrote and interviewed in styles far different from today's cut and dried cut and paste. Thanks to The PARIS REVIEW and (in a slightly different vein) PLAYBOY, the literary interview has stultified in recent years into a completely stodgy genre, ripe with conventions and rigid with tropes. Reading this book, we are there for the birth of the interview, in which every journalist had a different idea of what an interview should be like. Some are nearly three act plays, some brief sonnets, some grim novellas, and others are like episodes of a proto-LAUGH IN. Nearly all of them bring Mark Twain to life as does nothing else, not even the autobiography.

You can tell he, a former newspaperman, believed in giving his brothers and sisters their money's worth. In one interview Clara (Mrs Samuel Clemens) ventures into the room and she is shocked to hear the tall tales coming out of her husband's mouth. "I think it would be better," she hints, "if your wife saw your interviews in print before they were published." This was before the invention of the tape recorder, of course, and it is especially amusing to hear three or four reporters' accounts of the same press conference--all of them "quoting" Twain purportedly verbatim, but none of "him" saying the same thing twice. I can't imagine the assiduity with which editor Scharnhorst must have had to track down all these items, but the multiple accounts is what really makes the project seem like living history.

We don't recognize the names of most of the reporters (many stories were filed anonymously) but now and then a famous name creeps in. The New York Herald commissions Rudyard Kipling, for example, during a visit of Kipling to New England, and has him attempt to track Twain down at his mother in law's house in Elmira (summer 1890).

The interviews increase as Twain, bankrupted by bad investments, undergoes heroic reading tours that span the globe, as he tries to pay off his investors. Eerily enough bankruptcy had earlier struck Twain's hero, Sir Walter Scott, who drove himself to the grave trying to make good his debts, and they were the same age--58--when this disaster struck. "If I have to pay my debts by writing books as Scott had to write them," he tells the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1895, "I might easily kill myself in five years as he did." Nearly every piece is funny, except when Twain's ragging on about the copyright issue he was so hepped on (and even there he's able to provoke a black humor, like that of Pudd'nhead Wilson) or when human injustice makes him dark with rage, as against Leopold II of Belgium. And yet the overall impression is of a man always on edge, whose performative genius renewed him again and again, and yet destroyed him eventually. His "Mark Twain"-ness turned into something of a shtick--the snowy white hair, the white cotton suits, the omnipresent cigar, even the femme fatale habit of receiving journalists in bed in his nightclothes--but in his insistence on maintaining a space for "trading lies" within a general framework of outrageous honesty, a coruscating, inventive wit still dazzles.

My favorite pieces? Twain grimly encountering ancient men who claim that they were the originals of Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer as boys. Or his routine on how hotels keep plumbers' uniforms in basement lockers for their waiters to dress in when they pretend to be attending to plumbing problems in his suite.

Synthesizing and extending the insights of his mentors Alex Callinicos and Margaret Archer, social theorist Sean Creaven constructs a compelling exposition of classical Marxism and how it can be conceptualized in scientific and historical studies of society. By incorporating a critical realist ontology and epistemology as conceptual under-laborers, his model successfully resolves a number of quandries that have confronted previous interpretations of Marx and Engels.

Among these problems are mechanical economic determinism, which Creaven disavows; the primacy of the economy in explaining socio-economic evolution, which Creaven defends; the distinction between the forces and relations of production, which he persuasively argues is more analytic than ontological; and the meaning of Marx's base-superstructure metaphor, which Creaven brilliantly supplements by adding a sub-structure (human biology), which was clearly implicit in Marx's writings. Creaven also spends a considerable portion of the book defining the subject's relationship to society. Here he disavows evolutionary biology but also eschews reductive discourse theory, arguing that biology and society co-determine the subject and dialectically determine each other.

This book is a gem and, dare I say, at least as impressive as Callinicos's Making History (1987, 2004). It is a comprehensive yet readable analysis of the relationship of social change to individuals and social structures, as well as of the relationship between biology and the subject. It is also a good defense of Marxism to boot. In short, a must have for Marxist-influenced social scientists or historians, above all those wishing to sharpen their understanding of how Marxism can be relevant to their research and analysis.

The Material Image is concerned with cinematic adaptations of two-dimensional art images, ranging from tableaux vivant to painting, photography, and even literary images, and their impact on narrative and spectator response. When these two-dimensional forms are introduced into the temporally active space of moving pictures, the result is a more complicated visual representation that invites increased spectatorial awareness of the filmic image as a constructed representation rather than as a "true" reflection of reality. The two-dimensional image either textures the narrative, increasing symbolism and visual depth at the moment of representation, or stultifies the narrative, rupturing the illusion of the film text as reality. Peucker also discusses moments of "collapse of the image with the real" (192) that seem implicitly to follow from tromp l'oeil painting, such as when actors break the imaginary fourth wall of the set to address the audience directly, or when the image becomes so compelling that the spectator is somatically affected by it.

Peucker begins with a chapter on the aestheticization of surfaces (drawing from the visual theories of Bazin and Kracauer discussed in her introduction), and quickly moves into subsequent discussions on the role of visual signification in narrative film and its ability to represent reality intertextually by displaying still and moving images, sound, and writing on the screen. Later chapters focus on methods of using static images either to create distance or to draw the viewer into the film, classical and counter- cinematic techniques of representing space and the body, and the visceral impact of layered, fragmented, and mediated film images. While Peucker investigates film's capacity to excite both visceral and cognitive responses from its audience, ultimately her concerns gravitate toward the body as the site of reception for cinematic images that represent violence, the erotic, and the abject.

My favorite chapters were the ones on Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Haneke. In her readings of Hitchcock's films, she explores the relationship between two-dimensional art and death (death as the body's collapse into the world of stasis). She studies Hitchcock's preoccupations with still-life images and surrealism, bodily fragmentation, taxidermy, doubling, the use and placement of mirrors, characters' gazes both within and out of the filmic frame, and the self-reflexive inclusion of cameras in his films. Her second chapter on Hitchcock further explores the impact of characters' gazes into off-screen space, effecting the interpellation of the spectator and causing a figurative collapse between the image and the real.

In her reading of Kubrick's The Shining, Peucker observes the relationship between the hotel's photographs or figurative memory, and the return of the repressed elicited by the family's isolation within the disturbed psyche of the eerily expansive hotel. The space of realism within the film text begins to dissolve into the realm of the phantasmagoric as Jack's experiences collide with his imagination of the hotel's former "life." The still photographs of wild hotel parties from an earlier part of the century seem primed to burst into animation again, but with the emergence of festivity comes violence. Peucker remarks on the juxtaposition between the static photographs and the uncanny materiality of this violence, between Jack's deranged facial expressions and his later frozen grimace in the snow.

The book's longest chapter on Michael Haneke--the one I was reading for-- looks at his entire corpus as a postmodern experiment in bourgeois melodrama and family violence. Peucker argues that Haneke's work explores violence not by making a spectacle of it, but by launching an "assault" on the spectator's senses, including his use of sound and narrative suggestion. In some cases, as in Funny Games, the camera's gaze is carefully averted from violence, so that the most violent scenes of the film are mediated through sound rather than sight. Peucker quotes Haneke in saying that he feels this method of portraying violence actually creates a more powerful audience response than the recycling of overused spectacles of murder and mutation. In Benny's Video, the visual experience of violence is not averted but mediated by an extra layer of video footage, so that the real documentary footage of a pig slaughter unfolds within the diegesis of the film at a second remove--on one of Benny's video tapes, which he obsessively plays again and again. When he later brings a girl to his bedroom and murders her, Peucker remarks that the video transforms from a representation of violence to a source of violence. Benny actually tapes this second murder as well, and the tape later serves as legal evidence against him.

In keeping with the trajectory of her thesis, Peucker argues that while Haneke claims to engage his audiences in a participatory and self-reflexive relationship with his films, his films actually provoke a stronger visceral than cognitive response. However, other aspects of her analysis reveal the director's strong appeals to audience cognition, such as Haneke's signature use of the "rewind" effect in his films. In Benny's Video, Benny plays the film of the pig slaughter forwards and backwards voyeuristically; the fragmented and mediated video image continually reminds the audience that the slaughter is not happening in (Benny's) "real time" and thus allows the audience a certain contemplative distance from the image. In addition, Peucker comments on the film 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, in which black-outs in the film text rupture the diegesis and prevent the viewer from re-assembling the fragments of the text into a coherent whole. In one scene, the cinematic frame includes the image of a ping-pong ball machine, which keeps thrusting balls at the camera lens (and hence at the audience). Peucker points out that the ping-pong ball machine is in a sense a mirror image of the camera (both shooting at each other). Here, "the film sets up a mirror relation between character as both player and spectator (who receives images/Ping-Pong balls), and the spectator of the film. Hence, the point at which the film's spectators are most aware of themselves as corporeal is also its most self-reflexive moment, a moment when the film points to its apparatus" (Peucker 140). While Peucker doesn't discuss the opportunities this cinematic self-reflexivity provides for viewer reflection, her reading of the scene clearly implies that the film is constructed to provoke thought as well as feeling. She writes off these experiments as "lip service... paid to self-reflexivity" (132), but she simultaneously claims that "Haneke's films wrest their spectators from passivity by preventing the tears that melodrama seeks to solicit" (156).

I highly recommend The Material Image to anyone interested in film studies or visual theory. The book is unabashedly theoretical without alienating readers who lack a strong background in film theory. Peucker also makes it easy for students to excerpt relevant chapters and save the rest for later.

When the psychologist decide to leave the mentalistic culture and take the science and statistical methods as tool for work, then our history will change. Before was Fisher, Gosset, Skinner an so on., and now is the moment to give the oportunity for J. D Truot's book to remember our responsability.

I recommend it without fear.

The author is apparently not afraid to rock the boat of conventionality - he's comfortable (and adept) at poking holes at many commonly held truisms such as UFO visitations, Bigfoot, and 'AIDS is a CIA plot'. This one should ruffle some feathers.

Gilson is the consummate Thomist and this brief but powerful work is possibly his best in print. Gilson sets forth to establish a case that knowledge is not merely conceptual. Intellect, Gilson argues, is based upon an external reality. In other words, the possibility of the intellectual act is due to an external reality. This is crucial for the Thomistic philosopher especially when dealing with Kantian Idealism. Gilson compares Thomistic metaphysics and epistemology with other popular "brands" such as Cartesian and Kantian. Then Gilson delineates the proper starting point philosophically and where certain philosophers have missed the mark. This small book presupposes that the reader has a background in the issues at hand. Thus, if the reader is not prepared to understand the arguments he may get lost in the jargon. However, with the proper understanding of the terms and arguments at hand, this book is a powerful loaded gun. I cannot recommend this particular work enough!

Serious criticism about living authors is an oddity, especially if the author is on the peak of his/her career. This rule is broken by Rich, who offers an insightful and complete analysis of Munoz Molina's work. Based on the concepts of postmodern narrative by Hutcheon and McHale, Rich provides an in-depth reading of the historical connotations of the Spanish writer's fiction. His reading of Beltenebros as a "historiographic metafiction" is particularly enriching. For those who admire the Spanish writer this book is an excellent way to discuss ideas about his work, because despite of being a little bit technical it is still very legible.

David A. Baldwin's edited work of Neorealism and Neoliberalism is composed of twelve chapters. Arthur Stein remarks that states take decisions independently in anarchic international system while institutions/regimes necessitate joint decision making in this process. Stein cited regimes as a solution to common cooperation problems in the prisoners' dilemma settings. He also argues that regimes create an environment, in which states find rational incentives for cooperation since rational self-interest would lead to joint decision making through regimes. It is also remarkable in Stein's chapter that he holds power as determinant of regime transformation, however, he also ties changes in knowledge and technology as important sources of regime change. Charles Lipson in "International Cooperation in Economic and Security Affairs" basically points out that international cooperation in economic areas is relatively more easier than in security issues since relative gains calculations are dominant in security-military realm while absolute gain assumptions are more likely to happen in economic affairs. On the other hand, Lipson also argues that neorealism generally ignores the role of interdependence in international cooperation. In fact, this tendency is one the fundamental differences between neorealists and neoliberals. While the former generally assumes that interdependency lead to conflict among states the latter sees it much more as facilitating factor for international cooperation. Robert Axelrod and Robert D. Keohane's "Achieving Cooperation under Anarchy: Strategies and Institutions" has important insights about the problem of cooperation. They mention three factors that directly influence the probability of cooperation among states. They are mutuality of interests (payoff structure), the shadow of future, and the number of players (sanction problem). These considerations, no doubt, are about game theory driven settings among states. In addition, they emphasize that states should not be considered under just one game setting; rather multilevel games in various issue areas take place among states. Duncan Snidal also emphasizes the difference between two-state and multi-state settings in the seventh chapter. Moreover, Axelrod and Keohane attribute significant importance to perceptions and misperceptions for international cooperation. In the following chapter, Joseph M. Grieco makes a critique of neoliberal institutionalism (NLI). He generally sees NLI as unsuccessful in their criticisms of realism. However, he separates sociological institutionalists and knowledge driven institutionalists from NLI as well competitors with realist approach of institutions and international cooperation in general.There are two important arguments that deserve attention in Helen Milner's chapter. First of them, the separation of domestic and international politics is not so useful in studying the problem of international cooperation since sharp distinctions are hardly possible. The second argument is that overemphasizing anarchy is dangerous, it serves much more to conflict not to cooperation among states. The distinguishing discussion in Robert Powell's chapter is that his argument on iterated/repeated games. He claims that iterated games do not ensure cooperation unlike to some optimistic neoliberal institutionalists argue. Michael Mastanduna in his part (ch.10) makes the same argument as Helen Milner does: the separation of domestic and international politics is hardly possible since domestic and international settings intermingle with each other. (p.263) The other important argument in this chapter is that the decreasing external security threats will lead to the rise in relative gain calculations among states.When one looks the emerging problems between the US and the EU and Japan in the aftermath of the Cold War this argument has been seemed to be relevant. R. Keohane and J. Grieco extend the debate of international cooperation in the last two chapters. Keohane as a neoliberal institutionalist puts institutions on the center for the problem of cooperation among states. He argues that institutions change conceptions of states' self-interest throughout `bounded rationality'. States then find rational incentives for cooperation in serving their self-interests. He also reiterates the neoliberal institutionalists' central argument; relative gain assumptions make cooperation more difficult. On the other hand, Grieco from the realist side boldly argues that institutions do not mitigate anarchy's constraining effect. Both Keohane and Grieco, however, agrees that the future of the European Union will be a very good test case for neorealist and neoliberal institutionalist debates on international cooperation. Overall, Neorealism and Neoliberalism offers a good epistemology of neorealist-neoliberal debate, hence it should be a must reading in IR theory.

Professor Nuttall enters the politically contested arena of mimesis studies and wins many points through intelligent and original thinking. Every post-modern critic should read this book. It may set a few of them straight.

This is the best book that I have ever read! The auther pours the information on to the sheet with utter perfection!