Автор работы: Пользователь скрыл имя, 10 Января 2015 в 03:11, реферат
Many labels circulate for the era between the Civil War and World War I—the Gilded Age, La Belle Epoque, the Age of Realism, the Age of Energy, the Age of Darwin, the Age of Colonialism and Empire. To imagine what America was like during this dynamic period, we need them all: this was a time of unprecedented wealth for thousands of Americans, and urban poverty for millions of new immigrants; there was political upheaval in the streets, technological revolution everywhere, and exuberant experimentation in the arts.
Introduction.
The term “naturalism”, its appearance.
Naturalism movement in America.
American naturalists.
Conclusion.
Used sources.
CONTENTS
Introduction.
Conclusion.
Used sources.
INTRODUCTION
Many labels circulate for the era between the Civil War and World War I—the Gilded Age, La Belle Epoque, the Age of Realism, the Age of Energy, the Age of Darwin, the Age of Colonialism and Empire. To imagine what America was like during this dynamic period, we need them all: this was a time of unprecedented wealth for thousands of Americans, and urban poverty for millions of new immigrants; there was political upheaval in the streets, technological revolution everywhere, and exuberant experimentation in the arts. The era was filled with artistic fashions and insurrections—the fin de siècle, Aestheticism, Symbolism, Decadence, Realism, Impressionism, Naturalism, Imagism, Veritism, Late Romanticism. This was the heyday of “isms,” of struggles for new art, and new ways of interpreting human experience. Many of these movements endured only fleetingly, and their manifestos failed. However, others made a lasting impact on the culture of the Western world.
To fully understand the times, readers should bear in mind the fact that the era consisted of an unprecedented belief in systems. An enthusiasm for big-scale planning and developing elaborate schemes to solve social and moral problems and create wealth spread into many fields of human endeavor. Boston, Pittsburgh, New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Baltimore, St. Louis, and San Francisco exploded in size because of industrial innovation, and civil leaders, in the words of Chicago’s Daniel Burnham, made “no small plans.” Mobile steam-powered equipment could now level hills and turn vast wetlands into tracts of buildable real estate. New, city-sized neighborhoods, uniform and orderly in layout (though not always sanitary or well-built), could be constructed in months. Similar technology brought in millions of people from the countryside and overseas to live in these new towns and work in milling, mining, and mass production.
The literary arts felt the impact. American realism (as promulgated by William Dean Howells and other social-minded critics) was intentionally aimed at this new tide of middle-class readers, eager to read about life as they knew it: life in contemporary cities and small towns, and the aspirations and struggles of people like themselves in an era of mobility and social dislocation. The realist had a moral and social role: to hold a mirror up to ordinary life, and help an emerging society understand itself and achieve its own voice. The major American realists, however, were fiercely independent, and rarely let ground rules of the mode stand in the way of their own imaginations. Mark Twain wrote romances about Medieval England; Edith Wharton, Henry James, and even Howells himself published ghost stories as well as novels about manners, marriage, domestic crises, and social classes. The African-American realist Charles Chesnutt and the Asian-American realist Sui Sin Far published fiction about social life in a “real” America, which James and Wharton rarely encountered and only vaguely understood.
In literary naturalism, as practiced by Crane, Chopin, London, and Dreiser, the human condition is imagined in post-Darwinist terms. In Crane’s “The Open Boat” and “The Blue Hotel” and London’s “To Build a Fire,” the narrative centers on characters who prove incapable of understanding themselves or their own predicament until it is too late—and sometimes not even then. The archetypal man or woman in American naturalistic fiction is, by the prescription of the mode, a small organism overwhelmed by social, biological, and environmental forces, with no real chance for dominion over his or her own life or destiny.
Marxism, Utopian and Fabian Socialism, Social Darwinism—these terms of the era suggest that an urge to systematize and make permanent drove political and philosophical thought. At the same time, there were reactions against this intellectual fashion: by the end of the nineteenth century, anarchist and nihilist movements rose in power. Although such anti-systems were ridden with paradox and contradiction, they reveal the fact that many did not accept the values that moved the economy, technology, and intellectual life.
THE TERM NATURALISM AND ITS APPEARANCE
The term naturalism describes a type of literature that attempts to apply scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings. Unlike realism, which focuses on literary technique, naturalism implies a philosophical position. For naturalistic writers, since human beings are, in Emile Zola's phrase, "human beasts," characters can be studied through their relationships to their surroundings.
Naturalistic writers were influenced by the evolution theory of Charles Darwin. They believed that one's heredity and social environment decide one's character. Whereas realism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, naturalism also attempts to determine "scientifically" the underlying forces (i.e. the environment or heredity) influencing these subjects' actions. They are both opposed to Romanticism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic, or even supernatural treatment. Naturalistic works often include uncouth or sordid subject matter. For example, Émile Zola's works had a sexual frankness along with a pervasive pessimism. Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshness of life, including poverty, racism, prejudice, disease, prostitution, filth, etc. They were often very pessimistic and frequently criticized for being too blunt. Zola's 1880 description of this method in Le roman experimental (The Experimental Novel, 1880) follows Claude Bernard's medical model and the historian Hippolyte Taine's observation that "virtue and vice are products like vitriol and sugar"--that is, that human beings as "products" should be studied impartially, without moralizing about their natures. Other influences on American naturalists include Herbert Spencer and Joseph LeConte.
Through this objective study of human beings, naturalistic writers believed that the laws behind the forces that govern human lives might be studied and understood. Naturalistic writers thus used a version of the scientific method to write their novels; they studied human beings governed by their instincts and passions as well as the ways in which the characters' lives were governed by forces of heredity and environment. Although they used the techniques of accumulating detail pioneered by the realists, the naturalists thus had a specific object in mind when they chose the segment of reality that they wished to convey.
In George Becker's famous and much-annotated and contested phrase, naturalism's philosophical framework can be simply described as "pessimistic materialistic determinism." Another such concise definition appears in the introduction to American Realism: New Essays. In that piece, “The Country of the Blue,” Eric Sundquist comments, "Revelling in the extraordinary, the excessive, and the grotesque in order to reveal the immutable bestiality of Man in Nature, naturalism dramatizes the loss of individuality at a physiological level by making a Calvinism without God its determining order and violent death its utopia".
A modified definition appears in Donald Pizer's Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, Revised Edition (1984):
The naturalistic novel usually contains two tensions or contradictions, and… the two in conjunction comprise both an interpretation of experience and a particular aesthetic recreation of experience. In other words, the two constitute the theme and form of the naturalistic novel. The first tension is that between the subject matter of the naturalistic novel and the concept of man which emerges from this subject matter. The naturalist populates his novel primarily from the lower middle class or the lower class. . . . His fictional world is that of the commonplace and unheroic in which life would seem to be chiefly the dull round of daily existence, as we ourselves usually conceive of our lives. But the naturalist discovers in this world those qualities of man usually associated with the heroic or adventurous, such as acts of violence and passion which involve sexual adventure or bodily strength and which culminate in desperate moments and violent death. A naturalistic novel is thus an extension of realism only in the sense that both modes often deal with the local and contemporary. The naturalist, however, discovers in this material the extraordinary and excessive in human nature.
The second tension involves the theme of the naturalistic novel. The naturalist often describes his characters as though they are conditioned and controlled by environment, heredity, instinct, or chance. But he also suggests a compensating humanistic value in his characters or their fates which affirms the significance of the individual and of his life. The tension here is that between the naturalist's desire to represent in fiction the new, discomfiting truths which he has found in the ideas and life of his late nineteenth-century world, and also his desire to find some meaning in experience which reasserts the validity of the human enterprise.
We can summarize the information in ELEMENTS OF NATURALISM :
the conflict in naturalistic literature is generally "Man v. Nature" or "Man v. Himself";
characters often struggle to maintain a "veneer of civilization" as their external pressures threaten to release the "brute within," which is composed of strong and often warring emotions;
Nature is indifferent force acting on the lives of people;
Focus on the forces of heredity and environment as they affect our individual lives;
Nature is deterministic and indifferent;
Naturalistic texts often describe the futile attempts of humans to exercise free will;
free will is presented as an illusion;
some naturalists would argue that humans are animals incapable of free will;
Detailed accuracy is also common in naturalistic works.
NATURALISM MOVEMENT IN AMERICA
In the United States, the genre is associated principally with writers such as Abraham Cahan, Ellen Glasgow, David Graham Phillips, Jack London, and most prominently Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser. The term naturalism operates primarily in counter distinction to realism, particularly the mode of realism codified in the 1870s and 1880s, and associated with William Dean Howells and Henry James.
It is important to clarify the relationship between American literary naturalism, with which this entry is primarily concerned, from the genre also known as naturalism that flourished in France from the 1850s to the 1880s. French naturalism, as exemplified by Gustave Flaubert, and especially Emile Zola, can be regarded as a programmatic, well-defined and coherent theory of fiction that self-consciously rejected the notion of free will, and dedicated itself to the documentary and "scientific" exposition of human behavior as being determined by, as Zola put it, "nerves and blood."
Many of the American naturalists, especially Norris and London, were heavily influenced by Zola. They sought explanations for human behavior in natural science, and were skeptical, at least, of organized religion and beliefs in human free will. However, the Americans did not form a coherent literary movement, and their occasional critical and theoretical reflections do not present a uniform philosophy. Although Zola was a touchstone of contemporary debates over genre, Dreiser, perhaps the most important of the naturalist writers, regarded Honore de Balzac, one of the founders of Realism, as a greater influence. Naturalism in American literature is therefore best understood historically in the generational manner outlined above. In philosophical and generic terms, American naturalism must be defined rather more loosely, as a reaction against the realist fiction of the 1870s and 1880s, whose scope was limited to middle-class or "local color" topics, with taboos on sexuality and violence.
Naturalist fiction often concentrated on the non-Anglo, ethnically marked inhabitants of the growing American cities, many of them immigrants and most belonging to a class-spectrum ranging from the destitute to the lower middle-class. The naturalists were not the first to concentrate on the industrialized American city, but they were significant in that they believed that the realist tools refined in the 1870s and 1880s were inadequate to represent it. Abraham Cahan, for example, sought both to represent and to address the Jewish community of New York's East Side, of which he was a member. The fiction of Theodore Dreiser, the son of first and second generation immigrants from Central Europe, features many German and Irish figures. Frank Norris and Stephen Crane, themselves from established middle-class Anglophone families also registered the ethnic mix of the metropolis, though for the most part via reductive and offensive stereotypes. In somewhat different ways, more marginal to the mainstream of naturalism, Ellen Glasgow's version of realism was specifically directed against the mythologizing of the South, while the series of "problem novels" by David Graham Phillips, epitomized by the prostitution novel Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917), can be regarded as naturalistic by virtue of their underclass subject-matter.
Allied to this, naturalist writers were skeptical towards, or downright hostile to, the notions of bourgeois individualism that characterized realist novels about middle-class life. Most naturalists demonstrated a concern with the animal or the irrational motivations for human behavior, sometimes manifested in connection with sexuality and violence. Here they differed strikingly from their French counterparts.
The naturalist often describes his characters as though they are conditioned and controlled by environment, heredity, instinct, or chance. But he also suggests a compensating humanistic value in his characters or their fates which affirms the significance of the individual and of his life. The tension here is that between the naturalist's desire to represent in fiction the new, discomfiting truths which he has found in the ideas and life of his late nineteenth-century world, and also his desire to find some meaning in experience which reasserts the validity of the human enterprise.
The works of Stephen Crane played a fundamental role in the development of Literary Naturalism. While supporting himself by his writings, he lived among the poor in the Bowery slums to research his first novel: Maggie: A Girl Of The Streets (1893). Crane's first novel is the tale of a pretty young slum girl driven to brutal excesses by poverty and loneliness. It was considered so sexually frank and realistic, that the book had to be privately printed at first. It was eventually hailed as the first genuine expression of Naturalism in American letters and established its creator as the American apostle of an artistic revolution which was to alter the shape and destiny of civilization itself.
Much of Crane's work is narrated from an ordinary point of view, who is in an extraordinary circumstance. For example, The Red Badge of Courage depicted the American Civil War from the point of view of an ordinary soldier. It has been called the first modern war novel. One of Stephen Crane's more famous quotes come from his naturalistic text, The Open Boat: "When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples."
Benjamin Franklin Norris was an American novelist during the Progressive Era, writing predominantly in the naturalist genre. His notable works include McTeague (1899), The Octopus: A California Story (1901), and The Pit (1903). Although he did not support socialism as a political system, his work nevertheless evinces a socialist mentality and influenced socialist/progressive writers such as Upton Sinclair. Like many of his contemporaries, he was profoundly influenced by the advent of Darwinism. Through many of his novels, notably McTeague, runs a preoccupation with the notion of the civilized man overcoming the inner "brute," his animalistic tendencies.
Considered by many as the leader of Naturalism in American writing, Dreiser is also remembered for his stinging criticism of the genteel tradition and of what William Dean Howells described as the "smiling aspects of life" typifying America. In his fiction, Dreiser deals with social problems and with characters who struggle to survive. His sympathetic treatment of a "morally loose" woman in Sister Carrie was called immoral and he suffered at the hands of publishers. One of Dreiser's favorite fictional devices was the use of contrast between the rich and the poor, the urbane and the unsophisticated, and the power brokers and the helpless. While he wrote about "raw" experiences of life in his earlier works, in his later writing he considered the impact of economic society on the lives of people in the remarkable trilogy—The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic. His best known work is An American Tragedy which shows a young man trying to succeed in a materialistic society.
There were quite a few authors that participated in the movement of literary naturalism. They include Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth (1905)), Ellen Glasgow (Barren Ground, 1925), John Dos Passos (U.S.A. trilogy (1938): The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936)), James T. Farrell (Studs Lonigan (1934)), John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath, 1939), Richard Wright (Native Son (1940), Black Boy (1945)), Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead, 1948), William Styron (Lie Down in Darkness, 1951), Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March, 1953), and Jack London. These authors would reshape the way literature was perceived and their impact would spread all over the world (e.g. France).
Jack London (1876-1916)
In general, naturalism is the literary movement that provides the best context for Jack London. The appeal of naturalistic tales is often escape. The urban problems of unemployment, labor wars, and poverty are left behind for a spare scenario in which an individual can be tested. A stock naturalistic device involves taking an "overcivilized" man from the upper classes into a primitive environment where he must live by muscle and wit. Frank Norris uses this device in Moran of the Lady Letty, as does London in The Sea-Wolf. The Call of the Wild also fits this pattern, although here the hero is a dog. Buck, a dog of northern ancestry who has been raised in southern California, is kidnapped and taken to Alaska where he must adapt to snow and the rule of the club.
In another common naturalistic pattern, the hero who stays in the city either becomes an ineffectual dandy or degenerates into a lower-class brute. Frank Norris's Vandover and the Brute, set in San Francisco, traces the downward arc of Vandover's career from a Harvard education through the urban horrors of drink, dissipation, and aimless drifting to his ultimate reward: he literally becomes a primitive brute when he falls victim to lycanthropy and finds himself barking like a wolf. London treats these materials more realistically, yet employs the same pattern whereby the city is associated with degeneration and the open country with rebirth. Both Burning Daylight and The Valley of the Moon contrast the vitality of the heroes in the country to the dissipation and bad luck they encounter in the city. "South of the Slot" departs from this pattern by portraying the city as the setting for a working-class victory.
Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow (1873-1945)
Glasgow, Ellen Anderson Gholson 1873-1945, Writer. Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow, born in Richmond, Va., on 22 April 1873, published her first novel, The Descendant, in 1897, when she was 24 years old. With this novel Glasgow began a literary career encompassing four and a half decades and comprising 20 novels, a collection of poems, one of stories, and a book of literary criticism. Her autobiography, A Woman Within, was published posthumously in 1954. Glasgow's strong intellect led her to a conscious channeling of her creative energies toward the making of a substantial body of fiction. The framework of these works was to be, as she stated in 1898, at age 25, "a series of sketches dealing with life in Virginia." As she matured artistically, this early half-formed intention realized it self in a series of novels that constitutes a social history of her native Virginia. The great organizing ideas of her fiction are the conflicts between tradition and change, matter and spirit, the individual and society. The natural bent of her mind taught her that realism and irony were the best tools with which to fashion a new southern fiction to take the place of the sentimental stories of glorified aristocratic past that dominated the regional fiction of her day. Through her poor white heroes and heroines, she introduced democratic values seldom found in the works of other southern writers outside Mark Twain. From the very beginning of her intellectual and creative life, she rejected Victorian definitions of femininity dominating the social attitudes of her day. Glasgow produced seven novels of enduring literary merit. The Deliverance (1904) the best of her early novels, offers a naturalistic treatment of the class conflicts emerging after the Civil War. Its evocation of the Virginia landscape and tobacco farming invites comparison with Hardy's epics of the soil. In her women's trilogy— Virginia (1913), Life and Gabriella (1916), and Barren Ground (1925)—Glasgow assigns each of her Virginia heroines a fate determined by her response to the patriarchal code of feminine behavior that had formed her, a code that, as Glasgow shows so well in Barren Ground, always pitted women against their own biological natures. After Barren Ground, which marked her arrival at artistic maturity, Glasgow produced three sparkling comedies of manners— The Romantic Comedians (1926), They Stooped to Folly (1929), and The Sheltered Life (1932), the last the author's finest work. In these novels of urban Virginian life depicting the clash of generations, she again shows her women characters reacting to patriarchal stereotypes limiting their individuality and growth, while at the same time exposing either with comic or with satiric irony the limitations these views of women place on the male characters who hold them.