1、Lecture 10 American Naturalism,Lecture 10,American Naturalism,Naturalism,is sometimes claimed to give an even more accurate depiction of life than realism; is a mode of fiction that was developed by a school of writers in accordance with a particular philosophical thesis, which held that a human bei
2、ng exists entirely in the order of nature and does not have a soul nor any mode of participating in a religious or spiritual world beyond the natural world; and therefore, that such a being is merely a higher-order animal whose character and behavior are entirely determined by two kinds of forces, h
3、eredity and environment.,Naturalism,A person inherits compulsive instincts especially hunger, the drive to accumulate possessions, and sexuality and is then subject to the social and economic forces in the family, the class, and the milieu into which that person is born. The French novelist mile Zol
4、a (18401902) is the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism.naturalism.,Naturalism Naturalism,Zola and later naturalistic writers, such as the Americans Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser, try to present their subjects with scientific objectivity and with elaborat
5、e documentation (material that serves as a record), sometimes including an almost medical frankness about activities and bodily functions usually unmentioned in earlier literature.,Naturalism,They tend to choose characters who exhibit strong animal drives such as greed and sexual desire, and who are
6、 helpless victims both of glandular secretions within and of sociological pressures without. The end of the naturalistic novel is usually “tragic”, but not, as in classical and Elizabethan tragedy, because of a heroic but losing struggle of the individual mind and will against gods, enemies, and cir
7、cumstances. Instead the protagonist of the naturalistic plot, a pawn to multiple compulsions, usually disintegrates, or is wiped out.,“Muckraking” journalism,A period of grim social struggle Issues of poverty and political abuse Blended into the reportages of the muckraking journalists Both Crane an
8、d Dreiser - journalists exploring the life of the slum long before they were novelists,Correspondents Richard Harding Davis (left) and Stephen Crane during the Spanish American War,Absolute determinism,In determinism, individuals no longer appeared as morally independent actors in a Christian Univer
9、se Filings aligned by magnets Succumb to the logic of heredity and environment Thus behaviour - a problem for science, not a mystery of life,Naturalist Characters,A thoroughly different sense of character emerges: - dehumanized- determined- moved by inner and outer forces beyond conscious moral cont
10、rol,Naturalist Vs. Realist Characters,Realist characters - effective choice, free will, autonomous action Each character has the ability to choose and characteristically does so through scenes that enact a process of deliberation Weighing of alternative actions through consideration of consequences
11、The possibilities for the self are conceived in terms of responsible choice,Naturalist Vs. Realist Characters,Naturalist characters act out of a similar set of motives and desires Differ only in being unable to resist the conditions that press upon them The self may be no more than an illusion The d
12、ynamic forces that constrain ones actions from within as well as without not only overwhelm an otherwise integrated self but rather are that self in a fragmented state No disjunction between outer events and inner disposition,Naturalist Vs Realist Characters,Circumstances are the source of character
13、 in naturalism The realist heroes might always act differently in circumstances that destroy them They can attain a tragic stature Not so with the naturalist characters All the major American realists succumbed to certain determinist possibilities Sinclair Lewis: fictionalized circumstances that dep
14、rive their characters of autonomy,Absolute Determinism,How could such a philosophy thrive in a country so committed to personal liberty and individualism? Partly explained by - rapid industrialization - unprecedented influx of immigrants,American Naturalists,Lacked any sense of common purpose No sel
15、f-conscious school Shared in common an attraction to the philosophical determinism This concept that inspired the new narrative conceptions of setting and character was fully incorporated in the works of four American writers - Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser and Jack London,Stephen Cr
16、ane 1871 - 1900,The most bleakly nihilistic of the group Created the most clearly self-conscious body of work His career spanned little more than half a dozen years before he died of tuberculosis at twenty-eight,Cranes Works,Maggie: A Girl of the Streets 1893 The Red Badge of Courage 1894,Cranes Art
17、,The perspective he offers is of a fundamentally indifferent universe Directly contradicting those realists who felt that moral claims redeemed the starkness of experience, Crane depicted the world as inherently amoral and irredeemable Nature provides no haven in his fiction, nor are its processes a
18、ltered by desire Dramatizes the emptiness of deliberation and choice intensifying this vision of a thoroughly unaccommodating universe,Cranes Art,Settings of war, shipwreck and blizzard precluding quiet contemplation Characters who seem in the end enslaved no less by conventions than by circumstance
19、s Part of his characters inability to take responsibility for experience results from the unusual form of his representation: his nervous style contributes to a radical questioning of the very concept of the self,Cranes Art,The absence of strong plots Characters often lack names A tacit repudiation
20、of conventional labels and predictable judgments His narratives call into question all casual assumptions They compel us to recognize how any conclusion can only emerge from predetermining expectations Became the originator of Symbolism in America,Frank Norris (1870-1902),McTeague (1899) “Epic of th
21、e Wheat,” The Octopus (1901) ,The Pit (1903) ,The Wolf (unwritten),The Octopus (1901),deromanticizes the West. makes visible the capitalist economic structure that undergirds the mythical space of the West. continually tries to recuperate in the West a desire for prehistorical origins or a utopian v
22、ision of national unity.,Theodore Dreiser(1871 1945),born of a poor and intensely religious family in Indiana, who taught him to shun many human experiences as degrading or destructive; early developed a yearning for wealth, society; came to see life as a strangely magnificent composite of warring e
23、nergies, having no plan or purpose.,Theodore Dreiser,Sister Carrie (1900)Jennie Gerhardt (1911),Dreisers Art,In his novels impersonal energies always engulf desire, which becomes cause for neither nihilism, nor optimism Settings no longer constrain desire, but now express it fully, if only to confir
24、m in the end that desire itself can never be satisfied Identifying desire with urban settings, described in unprecedented detail The greatest chronicler of American cities,Dreisers Works,Sister Carrie 1900, 1907, 1912 Jennie Gerhardt, 1911 The Financier, 1912 A Traveller at Forty, 1913 The Titan, 19
25、14 Free, and Other stories, 1918 The Hand of the Potter (a play), 1918 Twelve Men (sketches), 1918 Hey, Rub-A-Dub-Dub, (essays), 1920 A Book About Myself, 1922,Dreisers Works,An American Tragedy, 1925 Chains, (stories), 1927 Moods, Cadenced and Declaimed, (poems), 1928 Dreiser Looks at Russia, 1928
26、A Gallery of Women, 1929 America is Worth Saving, 1941 The Bulwark, 1946 The Stoic, 1947,Dreisers Art,Recurrence of chance alignment of desire and environment Characters drift from place to place, and from person to person More than any other naturalist, Dreiser dramatized chance as a means of compe
27、lling characters to pay or gain for actions not their own,What does Carrie want?,For Carrie, happiness centers upon the self or more precisely, upon self-actualization: the deterministic structure of desire. The mediation of consumerism goes through a womans desire produced a sequence of seeing, wan
28、ting, consuming, and being consumed.,Dreisers Significance,Subsequent writers have borrowed from the fiction of Crane, Norris, and London The adaptations from Dreiser have made the tradition seem to continue John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck and Norman Mailer, even William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway have seemed to resemble Dreiser in technique or material,
