Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. It was depicted as a literary Literature , is the art of written works. Literally translated, the word literature means "acquaintance with letters" (as in the "arts and letters"). The two most basic written literary categories include fiction and nonfiction movement This is a list of modern literary movements: that is, movements after the Renaissance. These terms, helpful for curricula or anthologies, evolved over time to group writers who are often loosely related. Some of these movements were defined by the members themselves, while other terms (the metaphysical poets, for example) emerged decades or that seeks to replicate a believable The problem of verisimilitude is the problem of articulating what it takes for one false theory to be closer to the truth than another false theory. This problem was central to the philosophy of Karl Popper, largely because Popper was among the first to affirm that truth is the aim of scientific inquiry while acknowledging that most of the everyday reality Personal life is the course of an individual's life, especially when viewed as the sum of personal choices contributing to one's personal identity. It is a common notion in modern existence—although more so in more prosperous parts of the world such as Western Europe and North America. In these areas, there are service industries which are, as opposed to such movements as Romanticism Romanticism was a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution. In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific or Surrealism Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artifact. Leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all a, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic, or even supernatural treatment. Naturalism is the outgrowth of Realism Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of general "realism," Realist authors, a prominent literary movement This is a list of modern literary movements: that is, movements after the Renaissance. These terms, helpful for curricula or anthologies, evolved over time to group writers who are often loosely related. Some of these movements were defined by the members themselves, while other terms (the metaphysical poets, for example) emerged decades or in mid-19th-century France France is a founding member state of the European Union and is the largest one by area. France has been a major power for several centuries with strong cultural, economic, military and political influence in Europe and in the world. During the 17th and 18th centuries, France colonised great parts of North America; during the 19th and early 20th and elsewhere. Naturalistic writers were influenced by the evolution theory of Charles Darwin Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist[I] who established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection. He published his theory with compelling evidence for evolution in his 18.[1] They believed that one's heredity Heredity is the passing of traits to offspring . This is the process by which an offspring cell or organism acquires or becomes predisposed to the characteristics of its parent cell or organism. Through heredity, variations exhibited by individuals can accumulate and cause a species to evolve. The study of heredity in biology is called genetics, and social environment The social environment , also known as the milieu, is the identical or similar social positions and social roles as a whole that influence the individuals of a group. The social environment of an individual is the culture that he or she was educated and/or lives in, and the people and institutions with whom the person interacts. A given social determine one's character. Whereas realism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, naturalism also attempts to determine "scientifically" the underlying forces (e.g. the environment or heredity) influencing the actions of its subjects. Naturalistic works often include uncouth or sordid subject matter; for example, Émile Zola's works had a frankness about sexuality along with a pervasive pessimism. Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshness of life, including poverty, racism, sex, prejudice, disease, prostitution, and filth. As a result, naturalistic writers were frequently criticized for being too blunt.

Contents

Defining Characteristics

There are defining characteristics of literary naturalism. One of these is pessimism. Very often, one or more characters will continue to repeat one line or phrase that tends to have a pessimistic connotation, sometimes emphasizing the inevitability of death.

For example Bernard Bonnejean quotes this passage of Huysmans where the symbolism of death is visible, such an allegory, in a portrait of old woman:

[...] une vieille bique de cinquante ans, une longue efflanquée qui bêlait à la lune, campée sur ses maigres tibias [...] crevant les draps de ses os en pointe[2]

Another characteristic of literary naturalism is detachment from the story. The author often tries to maintain a tone that will be experienced as 'objective.' Also, an author will sometimes achieve detachment by creating nameless characters (though, strictly speaking, this is more common among modernists such as Ernest Hemingway). This puts the focus on the plot and what happens to the character, rather than the characters themselves. Another characteristic of naturalism is determinism. Determinism is basically the opposite of the notion of free will. For determinism, the idea that individual characters have a direct influence on the course of their lives is supplanted by a focus on nature or fate. Often, a naturalist author will lead the reader to believe a character's fate has been pre-determined, usually by environmental factors, and that he/she can do nothing about it. Another common characteristic is a surprising twist at the end of the story. Equally, there tends to be in naturalist novels and stories a strong sense that nature is indifferent to human struggle. These are only a few of the defining characteristics of naturalism, however.

Naturalism is an extension of realism, and may be better understood by study the basic precepts of that literary movement. The term naturalism itself came from Emile Zola.[citation needed] It is believed that he sought a new idea to convince the reading public of something new and more modern in his fiction. He argued that his innovation in fiction-writing was the creation of characters and plots based on the scientific method.

Literary Naturalism in the United States

In the United States, the genre is associated principally with writers such as Abraham Cahan, Ellen Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow was a Pulitzer Prize winning American novelist. Born in Richmond, VA, she 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 that comprised 20 novels, a collection of poems, short stories, and a book of, David Graham Phillips Phillips was born in Madison, Indiana. After graduating from high school, Phillips entered Asbury College -- following which he received a degree from College of New Jersey in 1887, John Steinbeck John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and East of Eden (1952) and the novella Of Mice and Men (1937). He wrote a total of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books and five collections of short stories. In 1962, Steinbeck received the Nobel, Jack London Jack London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. He is best remembered as the author of Call of the Wild, set in the Yukon Gold Rush, as, Edith Wharton Edith Wharton, born Edith Newbold Jones , was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer, and most prominently Frank Norris Benjamin Franklin Norris, Jr. 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), and Theodore Dreiser Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser was an American novelist and journalist. He pioneered the naturalist school and is known for portraying characters whose value lies not in their moral code, but in their persistence against all obstacles, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency. 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 William Dean Howells was an American realist author and literary critic. He was known for the Christmas story Christmas Every Day and Henry James Henry James, OM – February 28, 1916) was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice 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 at the end of the 19th century. French naturalism, as exemplified by Emile Zola Émile François Zola was an influential French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus,, can be regarded as a programmatic, well-defined and coherent theory of fiction that self-consciously rejected the notion of free will Free will is the purported ability of agents to make choices free from constraints. Historically, the constraint of dominant concern has been the metaphysical constraint of determinism. The opposing positions within that debate are metaphysical libertarianism, the claim that determinism is false and thus that free will exists; and hard determinism,, 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 Balzac Honoré de Balzac (20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of almost 100 novels, short stories and plays collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the fall of Napoléon Bonaparte in 1815 as a greater influence. Naturalism in American literature is therefore best understood historically in the generational manner outlined in the first paragraph 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. The most significant elements of this reaction can be summarized as follows.

Naturalist fiction in the United States was 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 Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser was an American novelist and journalist. He pioneered the naturalist school and is known for portraying characters whose value lies not in their moral code, but in their persistence against all obstacles, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency, 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 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.

See also

References

  1. ^ Williams (1976, 217).
  2. ^ Huysmans, Les Soeurs Vatard, Union générale, 1975,175 and 234,quoted in Bernard Bonnejean "Huysmans avant À Rebours : les fondements nécessaires d'une quête en devenir", in Le Mal dans l'imaginaire français (1850-1950), éd. David et L'Harmattan, 1998 (ISBN 2-7384-6198-0) ; "Huysmans before A Rebours: The necessary foundation for a quest to become", The evil in the French imaginary (1850-1950), Ed. David and L'Harmattan, 1998 (ISBN 2-7384-6198-0)

Sources

External links

Categories: Film genres Categories: Film theory | Genres by medium | Film | Literary movements | Realism (art movement) Categories: Art movements | Western art | Realism

 

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