American Literature 1820-1915_Part 11

American

Literature

From the Renaissance to The Age of Realism 1820-1915

Index

1.

The American Renaissance 1820-1865

2.

Transcendentalism

3.

The American Sublime

4.

The Age of Realism 1865-1915

4.

American Literature 1865-1915

4. The Age of Realism 1865-1915

W. E. B. DU BOIS 1868-1963

• A major influence on how Americans think, study and talk about race in the US.A broad spectrum: African-American literature, philosophy, political thought. Went to white schools and churches as a child => no discrimination as a child.Phd Thesis in Harvard: "The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870" (1895)
• Dedicated to the rigorous, scholarly examination of the so-called Negro problem => He progressively intertwined his scholarship and activism.
• A major work: The Souls of Black Folk (1903) => autobiography, social science, political commentary, musicology and fiction

=> "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line." => coined the notion of "twoness" of African Americans

4. The Age of Realism 1865-1915

W. E. B. DU BOIS 1868-1963

"One ever feels his twoness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dragged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."

4. The Age of Realism 1865-1915

W. E. B. DU BOIS 1868-1963

• This fundamental observation described what Du Bois named "double consciousness".
• The "Talented Tenth" => a college-educated elite could provide leadership for African Americans after Reconstruction.
• Challenged the enormous authority and power accumulated in the hands of one black spokesman Booker T. Washington => criticized for accepting disenfranchisement and segregation while settling for a low level of education in exchange for white "toleration".

4. The Age of Realism 1865-1915

W. E. B. DU BOIS 1868-1963

• 1910: editor of The Crisis, the official publication of the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)After 1920: frustrated by lack of fundamental change => research, political legislation to the search for longer-range worldwide economic solutions to the international problems of inequity among the races.
• MLK: "one of the most remarkable men of our time"

1. Prolegomena

Forms of Realism and Naturalism

• Newspapers and magazines nurtured post-Civil War authors

- many writers began their careers as journalists- periodicals published fiction by the major authors of the period- periodcicals gave rise to "the literature of argument"

• The idea of the "Great American Novel" emerged soon after the Civil War // American exceptionnalism
• Realism is the dominant style of the period

- William Dean Howells says that literary realism "is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material."- Henry James and Edith Wharton focus their literary realism on interior psychological states.- Mark Twain works within the tradition of vernacular storytelling.

3. American Literature 1865-1915

Themes in American Literature 1865-1915

• Civil War and its aftermath
• Reconstruction
• Modernization
• Industrialization
• Sexism and the Rise of the New Woman
• Racism and the Rise of Civil Rights
• Religion and Increasing Secularization
• Technological Innovation
• Literary Regionalism

• The Closing of the Frontier
• Native Americans and relocation
• The Politics of Class
• Immigration and Assimilation
• The Rise of the Metropolis

4. The Age of Realism 1865-1915

Realism

• All writers in the Realistic mode shared a commitment to referential narrative.

• Their readers expected to meet characters that:

- resembled ordinary people, - often of the middle class, - living in ordinary circumstances, - who experienced plausible real-life struggles and - who often, as in life, were unable to find resolutions to their conflicts.

• Realist writers developed these characters by using ordinary speech in dialogue, commensurate to the character’s social class.

4. The Age of Realism 1865-1915

Realism

• Often in Realistic stories, characterization and plot became intertwined

=> as the plot was formed from the exploration of a character working through or reacting to a particular issue or struggle. => characters often drove the plot of the story.

• Characters in Realistic fiction were three-dimensional, and their inner lives were often revealed through an objective, omniscient narrator.

4. The Age of Realism 1865-1915

Naturalism

• While they all, to some extent, embraced the Realist style of writing with its attention to detail and authenticity, they rejected Realism's tendency not to offend the sensibilities of readers of the genteel classes.

• The new writers were not afraid of provocative subject matters and wrote about the human condition in starker, grimmer contexts. They all, to some extent, were influenced by not only scientific ideas of the day, including Charles Darwin’s views on evolution, but also European writers experimenting with this new style: Naturalism.

4. The Age of Realism 1865-1915

Naturalism

• Émile Zola, a prominent French novelist, had articulated a theory of Naturalism in Le Roman Expérimental (1880).

• Zola had argued for a kind of intense Realism, one that did not look away from any aspects of life, including the base, dirty or ugly.

• Also influenced by Darwin, Zola saw the human in animal terms, and he argued that a novel written about the human animal could be set up as a kind of scientific experiment, where, once the ingredients were added, the story would unfold with scientific accuracy.

• He was particularly interested in how hereditary traits under the influence of a particular social environment might determine how a human behaves.

3. The American Sublime

Forms of Realism and Naturalism

"We must operate with characters, passions, human and social data as the chemist and the physicist work on inert bodies, as the physiologist works on living bodies. Determinism governs everything. It is scientific investigation; it is experimental reasoning that combats one by one the hypotheses of the idealists and will replace novels of pure imagination by novels of observation and experiment."

- Emile Zola

Zola, E. The Experimental Novel. New York: Haskell House. Publishers of Scholarly Books, 1964.

4. The Age of Realism 1865-1915

Naturalism

• With Darwin and Zola's influence apparent, the naturalists sought to push Realism even further, or as Frank Norris argued in his essay “A Plea for Romantic Fiction,” to go beyond the “meticulous presentation of teacups, rag carpets, wall paper, and hair-cloth sofas”—or beyond Realism as mere photographic accuracy— and to embrace a kind of writing that explores the “unplumbed depths of the human heart, and the mystery of sex, and the black, unsearched penetralia of the souls of men.”

• Norris is calling for a grittier approach in examining the human being as essentially an upright animal, a kind of walking complex combination of inherited traits, attributes, and habits deeply affected by social and economic forces.

4. The Age of Realism 1865-1915

Naturalism

• Naturalistic works went where Realistic works did not go, dealing with taboo subjects for the time, subjects such as prostitution, alcoholism, domestic violence, violent deaths, crime, madness, and degeneration.

• Sometimes defined as pessimistic materialistic determinism, Naturalism sought to look at human nature in a scientific light, and the author often took on the role of scientist, cooly observing the human animal in a variety of plights, at the mercy of forces beyond his control or understanding, compelled by instinct and determined by cause and effect to behave in certain, often self-destructive, ways as a result of heredity and environment.

• Narratives: defined by a region, journalistic, narrative distance between action and characters, "plot of decline" => decline of a character into degeneration or death.

4. The Age of Realism 1865-1915

EDITH WHARTON 1862-1937

• Edith Jones came of a distinguished and long-established New York family.
• 1879: her debut in society
• 1885: married Edward Wharton, a wealthy Boston banker.
• Her major literary model was Henry James, whom she knew, and her work reveals James’s concern for artistic form and ethical issues.
• Wharton’s first novel, The Valley of Decision, was published in 1902. The House of Mirth (1905) was a novel of manners that analyzed the stratified society in which she had been reared and its reaction to social change.
• The Reef (1912), The Custom of the Country (1913), Summer (1917), and The Age of Innocence (1920, won the Pulitzer Prize). In her manual The Writing of Fiction (1925) she acknowledged her debt to Henry James.

4. The Age of Realism 1865-1915

The Custom of the Country (1913)

• "Undine, as a child, had taken but a lukewarm interest in the diversion of her playmates. Even in the early days when she had lived with her parents in a ragged outskirt of Apex, and hung on the fence with Indiana Frusk, the freckled daughter of the plumber ‘across the way’, she had cared little for dolls or skipping-ropes, and still less for the riotous games in which the loud Indiana played Atalanta to all the boyhood of the quarter. Already Undine’s chief delight was to ‘dress up’ in her mother’s Sunday skirt and ‘play lady’ before the wardrobe mirror. The taste had outlasted childhood, and she still practised the same secret pantomime, gliding in, settling her skirts, swaying her fan, moving her lips in soundless talk and laughter; but lately she had shrunk from everything that reminded her of her baffled social yearnings. Now, however, she could yield without afterthought to the joy of dramatizing her beauty. Within a few days she would be enacting the scene she was now mimicking; and it amused her to see in advance just what impression she would produce on Mrs. Fairford’s guests."

4. The Age of Realism 1865-1915

The Custom of the Country (1913)

"To slave for women is part of the old American tradition; lots of people who give their lives for dogmas they’ve ceased to believe in. Then again, in this country the passion for making money has preceded the knowing how to spend it, and the American lavishes his fortune on his wife because he doesn’t know what else to do with it. “Then you call it a mere want of imagination for a man to spend his money on his wife?”

American Literature after 1915

4. The Age of Realism 1865-1915

The Great Gatsby (1925)

• This novel proves to be a very perceptive observation of the Roaring Twenties => a contrastive picture of America in those days, a period which is marked by post-war economic progress and a great prosperity.
• The author captures the frenzy and passion of American society, right in the middle of Prohibition, when alcohol was illegal .

=> “The parties were bigger, the pace was faster, the buildings were higher, and the morals were looser” (Nick Carraway - The Great Gatsby)

• Fitzgerald shows the new faith people in America used to place in money and materialism then, but he also renders the anxiety and sorrow lurking behind their superficial world.

4. The Age of Realism 1865-1915

The Great Gatsby (1925)

• All the action unfold during only one summer – that is, from mid-June to early September 1922.
• This summer is then the foundation from which Nick Carraway recreates retrospectively Gatsby's past life.
• There are a prologue and an epilogue that frame the events occurring within that interval of four months.These two key moments also correspond to the time of writing when Nick is back in the Mid-West and he thinks over his past experiences.
• The tragic aspect of the plot is also increased due to the fact that the major events have all taken place before the action in the book actually begins. Every action then receives its meaning in retrospect.

4. The Age of Realism 1865-1915

The Great Gatsby (1925)

• Fitzgerald to capture the atmosphere of confusion and the loss of values that is distinctive of the Jazz Age.
• Jazz Age coincided with Prohibition. Prohibition, or 'National Prohibition', refers to the period between 1919-1933 when alcohol was prohibited (with a few minor exceptions).
• => production, distribution, and sale of alcohol was illegal throughout the entire U.S. => speakeasies.

4. The Age of Realism 1865-1915

The Great Gatsby (1925)

• Fitzgerald's chief innovation in The Great Gatsby is to introduce a first person narrator and protagonist whose consciousness always reorganizes and filters the past events (Henry James, Joseph Conrad).

=> A homodiegetic narrator => he participates into the story he tells.=> There is a permanent internal focalization since events are seen exclusively from his point of view. => Nick Carraway is a peripheral narrator, at the margin of events, someone who's always on the outside looking in. => A filtering voice “Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” (37)