Reality reconsidered: politics, science and art

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Reality reconsidered politics, science and art

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August Comte (1798-1857) - positivism

• Founder of sociology
• Divided development of the human mind into three
  historical stages the theological, the
  metaphysical, and the scientific of positivist
  (the most mature)
• Applied a scientific method to all areas of human
  speculation. In particular he argued for the
  need for strict observation and experiment in the
  study of society
• Positivistic thinkers believed that science could
  solve all mysteries and answer all questions with
  assured authority

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Understanding reality

• Claude Bernard (1813-1878)
• An Introduction to the Study of Experimental
  Medicine (1865)
• Helped develop modern scientific method
• Observation not authority
• Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931) The Psychology of
  Crowds
• Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) worked on
  hysteria and the unconscious (Sigmund Freud
  studied under him)
• Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) the invisible world
  in which we live

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Influence of science and politics on literature
Realism

• Honoré de Balzac La Comédie humaine (1829-1854)
• Detailed descriptions of every-day life
• Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1857)
• Clinical, objective view
• Average subjects adultery
• Emile Zola Les Rougons-Maquart Histoire
  naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le second
  Empire (1871-1893)
• Race, milieu and moment determine behaviors
  (Hippolyte Taine)

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Art Realism

• Lack of artificiality of Romanticism or
  Neoclassicism
• Rejection of Romanticism and its emotionalism
• Ordinary subjects
• Democratization of subjects

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The Gleaners Jean-François Millet (1857)
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Impressionism

• Represent nature as the eye saw it--not as the
  mind conceived of it
• Painted outdoors with strong pure colors and
  colored shadows
• Analysis of light
• Light replaces lines
• Spontaneous

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Claude Monet Impression, Sun Rising 1872
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Monet Japanese Bridge
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Virginia Tech Summer Study in Paris
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Neoimpressionism (1886)

• Directly influenced by scientific theory of light
• Pointillisme (divisionism) dots of color

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Georges Seurat A Sunday Afternoon on the Island
of La Grande Jatte (1884-86)
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Innovations

• Early photography
• Niepce (1826)
• Daguerre (daguerrotype - 1840)
• August and Louis Lumière cinema 1895
• Eiffel Tower 1889 new heights in engineering