2130_American Lit Module 1 _Realism and Naturalism
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Transcript of 2130_American Lit Module 1 _Realism and Naturalism
Realism and Naturalism
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company
• The realist novel: a substantial work in prose that offers verisimilitude of detail, a norm of experience, and an objective view of human nature
• William Dean Howells says that literary realism “is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material”
Realism
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company
• Realist novels were set in believable, everyday locales; naturalist novels had extreme settings
• Realistic characters were usually middle class; naturalistic ones lower class
• Realist plots worked toward the restoration of order; in naturalist novels, the characters confront major crises and are destroyed by them
• A realist might suggest that good prevails, but naturalist characters are doomed by fate
Naturalism
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company
William Dean Howells
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company
“Will the reader be content to accept a novel which is an analytic study rather than a story, which is apt to leave him arbiter of the destiny of the author’s creations? Will he find his account in the unflagging interest of their development?”
William Dean Howells:“Henry James, Jr.”
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company
“It is a well ascertained fact concerning the imagination that it can work only with the stuff of experience. It can absolutely create nothing; it can only compose . . . Once for all, then, obedience to this law is the creed of the realist, and rebellion is the creed of the romanticist.”
William Dean Howells:“Novel-Writing and Novel Reading”
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company
• How do the characters in this story articulate their experience of reality through literary and nonliterary texts?– quoting Richard Lovelace’s poem “To Lucasta”– referencing journalism about the Spanish-
American War
• How do they experience reality in a direct and unmediated fashion?
William Dean Howells:“Editha”
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company
Henry James
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company
• “[Y]ou will not write a good novel unless you possess the sense of reality.”
• “Experience . . . is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spiderweb of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue.”
Henry James:“The Art of Fiction”
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company
Frank Norris
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company
“Terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic tale. They must be twisted from the ordinary, wrenched out from the quiet, uneventful found of every-day life, and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama that works itself out in unleashed passions, in blood, and in sudden death . . . It is all romantic, at times unmistakably so.”
Frank Norris: “Zola as a Romantic Writer”
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company
• “Romance . . . is the kind of fiction that takes cognizance of variations from the type of normal life. Realism is the kind of fiction that confines itself to the type of normal life.”
• “[T]o Romance belongs the wide world for range, and the unplumbed depths of the human heart . . . and the problems of life.”
Frank Norris:“A Plea for Romantic Fiction”
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company
Theodore Dreiser
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company
“The extent of all reality is the realm of the author’s pen, and a true picture of life, honestly and reverentially set down, is both moral and artistic whether it offends conventions or not.”
Theodore Dreiser:“True Art Speaks Plainly”
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company
Jack London
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company
“I was down in the cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths of misery about which it is neither nice nor proper to speak. I was in the pit, the abyss, the human cesspool, the shambles and the charnel-house of our civilization. This is the part of the edifice of society that society chooses to ignore.”
Jack London:“What Life Means to Me”
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Realism and Naturalism