It's only necessary to defend someone against the charge of being a mere observer if you have a narrow conception of realism, and observation.
In literature as in much else, the tenor of the Nineties was set by the New Republic, where James Wood's reviews of classic novels consistently dampened their ideological charge even as his reviews of contemporary fiction condemned deviation from a pinched conception of realism.
Anderson wrote in A Writer's Conception of Realism that he reacted with "shock" when he "...heard people say that one of my own books Winesburg, Ohio, was an exact picture of Ohio village life".
Topics to be considered include the meaning of stylistic innovation in the 19th century, the development and dissolution of the genres of landscape and portraiture, and varying conceptions of realism and abstraction.
Some writers use the term with such a broad meaning that any moral theory that is a version of moral realism — that is, any moral theory that holds that some positive moral claims are literally true (for this conception of moral realism, see Sayre-McCord 1988)— counts as a natural law view.
"We have lost faith in any of the large available understandings of how structural change takes place in history," he noted, "and as a result, we fall back on a bastardised conception of political realism, namely that a proposal is realistic to the extent that it approaches what already exists.
In essays and lectures, Rand developed her conception of metaphysical realism, rationality, ethical egoism (rational self-interest), individual rights, laissez-faire capitalism, and art, and applied her philosophy to social issues.
It is nevertheless a form of antirealism on traditional readings of Peirce and James, since both suggest that truth in the pragmatist sense exhausts our conception of reality, thus running foul of the metaphysical dimension of realism.
…consider the Jain conception of reality.
In the course of his argument, Wright offers original critical discussions of many central concerns of philosophers interested in realism, including the "deflationary" conception of truth, internal realist truth, scientific realism and the theoreticity of observation, and the role of moral states of affairs in explanations of moral beliefs.
The first conception of being Royce considered was realism, the view that the world exists entirely independently of our thoughts or ideas about it.
