美国文学Lecture 10.ppt

Lecture 10American NaturalismLecture 10 American NaturalismNaturalism 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 being 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,heredity and environment.NaturalismA 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 Zola(18401902)is the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism.naturalism.Naturalism NaturalismZola 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 elaborate documentation(material that serves as a record),sometimes including an almost medical frankness about activities and bodily functions usually unmentioned in earlier literature.NaturalismThey tend to choose characters who exhibit strong animal drives such as greed and sexual desire,and who are 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 circumstances.Instead the protagonist of the naturalistic plot,a pawn to multiple compulsions,usually disintegrates,or is wiped out.“Muckraking”journalismA period of grim social struggleIssues of poverty and political abuseBlended into the reportages of the muckraking journalistsBoth Crane and Dreiser-journalists exploring the life of the slum long before they were novelistsCorrespondents Richard Harding Davis(left)and Stephen Crane during the Spanish American War Absolute determinismIn determinism,individuals no longer appeared as morally independent actors in a Christian UniverseFilings aligned by magnetsSuccumb to the logic of heredity and environmentThus behaviour-a problem for science,not a mystery of lifeNaturalist CharactersA thoroughly different sense of character emerges:-dehumanized-determined-moved by inner and outer forces beyond conscious moral controlNaturalist Vs.Realist CharactersRealist characters-effective choice,free will,autonomous actionEach character has the ability to choose and characteristically does so through scenes that enact a process of deliberationWeighing of alternative actions through consideration of consequencesThe possibilities for the self are conceived in terms of responsible choiceNaturalist Vs.Realist CharactersNaturalist characters act out of a similar set of motives and desiresDiffer only in being unable to resist the conditions that press upon themThe self may be no more than an illusionThe dynamic 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 stateNo disjunction between outer events and inner dispositionNaturalist Vs Realist CharactersCircumstances are the source of character in naturalismThe realist heroes might always act differently in circumstances that destroy themThey can attain a tragic statureNot so with the naturalist charactersAll the major American realists succumbed to certain determinist possibilitiesSinclair Lewis:fictionalized circumstances that deprive their characters of autonomyAbsolute DeterminismHow could such a philosophy thrive in a country so committed to personal liberty and individualism?Partly explained by -rapid industrialization -unprecedented influx of immigrantsAmerican NaturalistsLacked any sense of common purposeNo self-conscious schoolShared 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 Crane 1871-1900The most bleakly nihilistic of the groupCreated the most clearly self-conscious body of workHis career spanned little more than half a dozen years before he died of tuberculosis at twenty-eightCranes WorksMaggie:A Girl of the Streets 1893The Red Badge of Courage 1894Cranes ArtThe perspective he offers is of a fundamentally indifferent universeDirectly contradicting those realists who felt that moral claims redeemed the starkness of experience,Crane depicted the world as inherently amoral and irredeemableNature provides no haven in his fiction,nor are its processes altered by desireDramatizes the emptiness of deliberation and choice intensifying this vision of a thoroughly unaccommodating universeCranes ArtSettings of war,shipwreck and blizzard precluding quiet contemplationCharacters who seem in the end enslaved no less by conventions than by circumstancesPart 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 selfCranes ArtThe absence of strong plotsCharacters often lack namesA tacit repudiation of conventional labels and predictable judgmentsHis narratives call into question all casual assumptionsThey compel us to recognize how any conclusion can only emerge from predetermining expectationsBecame the originator of Symbolism in America Frank Norris(1870-1902)McTeague(1899)“Epic of the 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 vision 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 energies,having no plan or purpose.Theodore Dreiser Sister Carrie(1900)Jennie Gerhardt(1911)Dreisers ArtIn his novels impersonal energies always engulf desire,which becomes cause for neither nihilism,nor optimismSettings no longer constrain desire,but now express it fully,if only to confirm in the end that desire itself can never be satisfiedIdentifying desire with urban settings,described in unprecedented detailThe greatest chronicler of American citiesDreisers WorksSister Carrie 1900,1907,1912Jennie Gerhardt,1911The Financier,1912A Traveller at Forty,1913The Titan,1914Free,and Other stories,1918The Hand of the Potter (a play),1918Twelve Men(sketches),1918Hey,Rub-A-Dub-Dub,(essays),1920A Book About Myself,1922 Dreisers WorksAn American Tragedy,1925Chains,(stories),1927Moods,Cadenced and Declaimed,(poems),1928Dreiser Looks at Russia,1928A Gallery of Women,1929America is Worth Saving,1941The Bulwark,1946The Stoic,1947Dreisers ArtRecurrence of chance alignment of desire and environmentCharacters drift from place to place,and from person to personMore than any other naturalist,Dreiser dramatized chance as a means of compelling characters to pay or gain for actions not their ownWhat 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,wanting,consuming,and being consumed.Dreisers SignificanceSubsequent writers have borrowed from the fiction of Crane,Norris,and LondonThe adaptations from Dreiser have made the tradition seem to continueJohn Dos Passos,John Steinbeck and Norman Mailer,even William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway have seemed to resemble Dreiser in technique or material