Transcript Document

American Literature
030533/4/5, 14th Nov. 2006
Lecture Eight
The American Realism
(III)
(1865 - 1918)
VI. Naturalism and Muckraking
1. The reasons on the coming of American Naturalism:
1)
2)
3)
Industrialism produced financial giants, but at the same time
created an industrial proletariat entirely at the mercy of external
forces beyond their control. Slums appeared in great numbers
where conditions became steadily worse.
New ideas about man and man’s place in the universe began to
take root in America. Living in a cold, indifferent, and
essentially Godless world, man was no longer free in any sense
of the word. Darwinian concepts like “the survival of the fittest”
and “the human beast” became popular catchwords and
standards of moral reference in an amoral world.
French naturalism, with its new technique and new way of
writing, appealed to the imagination of the younger generation.
2. The main characteristics of naturalism:
1)
2)
3)
The writers of naturalism tore the mask of gentility to pieces and
wrote about the helplessness of man, his insignificance in a cold
world, and his lack of dignity in face of the crushing forces of
environment and heredity. In their works there is a desire to
assert one’s human identity, to define oneself against the social
and natural forces one confronts
They reported truthfully and objectively, with a passion for
scientific accuracy and an overwhelming accumulation of
factual detail.
The major representatives of American naturalists include Jack
London, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser and so
on.
3. Muckraking:
 In dictionary:
1) Finding and publishing stories, perhaps using underhand
methods, that expose misconduct, corruption, hypocrisy,
or the like.
2) Publishing (perhaps invented) stories that give salacious
details of peoples’ private lives
 In literature:
1) Muckraking is applied to American journalists,
novelists, and critics who in the first decade of the
20th century attempted to expose the abuses of
business and the corruption in politics.
2) Muckraking novels used eye-catching journalistic
techniques to depict harsh working conditions and
oppressions. Norris’s Octopus (1901) exposed big
railroad companies while Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
(1906) painted the squalor of the Chicago meat-packing
houses, and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio,
emphasizes the quiet poverty, loneliness, and despair in
small-town America.
3) The muckraking movement lost support in about 1912.
Historians agree that if it had not been for the
revelations of the muckrakers the Progressive
movement would not have received the popular support
needed for effective reform.
Jack London (1876 – 1916)
1. About the author:
1)
2)
3)
4)
It is believed that London is an illegitimate child, who passed his
childhood in poverty in the Oakland slums. He had little formal
schooling, but was an avid reader, educating himself at public
libraries.
At the age of 17, he ventured to sea on a sealing ship and from
then on to voyages on ship became one of his favorites and
material for his later writing.
In his teens, he joined Coxey’s Army in its famous march on
Washington, D.C., and was later arrested for vagrancy. The
turning point of his life was a thirty-day imprisonment that was
so degrading it made him decide to turn to education and pursue a
career in writing.
His years in the Klondike a Gold Prospector (from 1897-1898 )
had to be ended because of his poor health, which would provide
abundant material for his future novels and stories .
5) Upon his return to Oakland, California, he could not
find steady work. In desperation, he decided to dive into
writing, launching his writing career.
6) Jack married two times in his life. The first wife is his
math tutor and the second one his secretary.
7) From 1905 to 1913, London set up his own “Beauty
Ranch” totaling 1,400 acres bought. At Beauty Ranch,
he raised many animals such as prize bulls, horses, and
pigs and cultivated a wide variety of crops, fully
enjoying the life of a rancher.
8) By his death at age forty on November 22, 1916, Jack
had been plagued for years by a vast number of health
problems, including stomach disturbances, ravaging
uremia, and failing kidneys.
2. His masterpiece:
 Many people argue as to what London's masterpiece was.
Some say The Call of the Wild, others say The Sea Wolf,
and still others say Martin Eden.
1) The Call of the Wild is thrilling
adventure story set in the Yukon
frontier, telling the gripping tale of a
dog named Buck who is wrenched out
of his life of ease and luxury to
become a sled dog in Alaska. Drawing
on his wolf heritage, Buck must fight
for survival in an alien environment,
experiencing both the cruelty of man
and the freedom of the wild.
2)
3)
The Sea-Wolf was based on his experiences at sea. When fate
lands Humphrey Van Weyden on board the Ghost, a sealing
schooner bound for Japan, little does he know of the weeks of
brutality which lie ahead. Captain Wolf Larsen is feared and
despised by all on board, and only the chance arrival of Maud
Brewster spurs Van Weyden into action in a desperate attempt to
free them both from the terrifying power of the Sea-Wolf. This
work embraced the concepts of unconfined individualism and
Darwinism in its exploration of the laws of nature. London
portrays a version of the Nietzschean superman in schooner
captain Wolf Larsen, one of the most memorable characters in
American literature.
Martin Eden. One of London's most important books is this semiautobiographical account of a young sailor who struggles to
improve himself and achieves eventual success as a writer, but
grows disenchanted with fame and wealth. It represents both an
indictment of the American dream and an important reflection on
London's own background and career.
4. Evaluation on him:
1)
2)
3)
Jack London, whose life symbolized the power of will, was the
most successful writer in America in the early 20th Century. His
vigorous stories of men and animals against the environment, and
survival against hardships were drawn mainly from his own
experience.
In fact, he was a prolific writer whose fiction explored three
geographies and their cultures: the Yukon, California, and the
South Pacific. He left over fifty books of novels, stories,
journalism, and essays, many of which have been translated and
continue to be read around the world.
He experimented with many literary forms, from conventional
love stories and dystopias to science fantasy. His noted
journalism included war correspondence, boxing stories, and the
life of Molokai lepers.
4) A committed socialist, he insisted against editorial
pressures to write political essays and insert social
criticism in his fiction.
5) He was among the most influential figures of his day,
who understood how to create a public persona and
use the media to market his self-created image of
poor-boy-turned-success.
6) London's great passion was agriculture, and he was
well on the way of creating a new model for ranching
through his Beauty Ranch when he died of kidney
disease at age 40.
Stephen Crane(1871 – 1900)
1. About the author:
1)
2)
3)
4)
Stephen Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1881, as the
14th child of a cultural family. Both of his parents did some
writing and two of his brothers became newspapermen.
Crane started to write stories at the age of eight; at 16 he was
writing articles for the New York Tribune.
Crane studied at Lafayette College and Syracuse University. After
his mother's death in 1890- his father had died earlier-Crane
moved to New York. He worked as a free-lance writer and
journalist for the Bachellor-Johnson newspaper syndicate. 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)
In 1895 the publication of The Red Badge of Courage and of his
first book of poems, The Black Riders, brought him international
fame.
5)
6)
7)
His reputation as a war writer, his desire to see if he had guessed
right about the psychology of combat, and his fascination with
death and danger sent him to Greece and then to Cuba as a war
correspondent.
His first attempt in 1897 to report on the insurrection in Cuba
ended in near disaster; the ship sank, and Crane--reported
drowned--finally rowed into shore in a dinghy with the captain.
The result was one of the world's great short stories, The Open
Boat. His others are The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, and The
Blue Hotel.
In 1898 Crane settled in Sussex, England. On June 5, 1900 in
Germany he died of tuberculosis, which was worsened by
malarial fever he had caught in Cuba.
2. His Major Works:
 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
 About the story: It is the harrowing story of a
poor sensitive young girl whose uneducated
alcoholic parents utterly fail her. In love and
eager to escape her violent home life, she allows
herself to be seduced into living with a young
man, who soon deserts her. When her selfrighteous mother rejects her, Maggie becomes a
prostitute to survive, but soon commits suicide
out of despair.
 The Red Badge of Courage.
 About the story:
1)
2)
The story is set during the American Civil War. Henry Fleming
enrolls as a soldier in the Union army. He has dreamed of battles
and glory all his life, but his expectations are shattered in his
encounter with the enemy when he witnesses the chaos on the
battle field and starts to fear that the regiment was leaving him
behind. He flees from the battle.
Later he returns to the lines and feels sore and stiff from his
experiences. In the heat of the battle, he picks up the regiment's
flag with his friend when it falls from the color sergeant's hands.
Following the conventions of a bildungsroman, Henry has
matured after the final battle and he understands better his
strengths and weaknesses.
 Relevant Evaluation:
1)
2)
3)
4)
It depicted the American Civil War from the point of view of an
ordinary soldier and has been called the first modern war novel.
It reveals the basic theme of the animal man in a cold,
manipulating world. Here Crane is looking into man’s primitive
emotions and trying to tell the elemental truth about human life.
War shown in the novel is a plain slaughter-house. There is
nothing like valor or heroism on the battlefield, and if there
anything, it is fear of death, cowardice, the natural instinct of man
to run from danger.
By thus un-romanticizing war and heroism, Crane initiated the
modern tradition of telling the truth at all costs about the
elemental human situation, and writing about war as a real human
experience. So this was an event of a revolutionary nature both in
theme and technique.
3. Evaluation on him:
1) Crane was a pioneer writing in the naturalistic tradition.
His writings gave the whole esthetic movement of the
nineties a sudden direction and a fresh impulse.
2) Crane was also a pioneer in the field of modern poetry.
His early poems, brief, quotable, with their unrhymed,
unorthodox conciseness and impressionistic imagery,
was to exert a significant influence on modern poetry:
As a matter of a fact, he is now recognized as one of
the two precursors of Imagist poetry, the other being
Emily Dickinson.
3) His basic motif is about environment and heredity
overwhelming man.
4) Crane’s fictional world is a naturalistic one in which
man is deprived of free will and expects no help from
any quarter whatever.
5) The secret of Crane's success as war
correspondent, journalist, novelist, short-story
writer, and poet lay in his achieving tensions
between irony and pity, illusion and reality, or
the double mood of hope contradicted by despair.
He was a great stylist and a master of the
contradictory effect.
Benjamin Franklin Norris (1870 - 1902)
I. About the author:
 Benjamin Franklin Norris, 1870–1902, American
novelist, b. Chicago. After studying in Paris, at the Univ.
of California (1890–94), and Harvard, he wrote
McTeague (1899), a proletarian novel influenced by the
experimental naturalism of Zola. His most impressive
work was his proposed trilogy, “The Epic of Wheat,” of
which only two parts were written—The Octopus
(1901), depicting the brutal struggle between the wheat
farmers and the railroad, and The Pit (1903), dealing
with speculation on the Chicago grain market, and The
third part, The Wolf, was never written.
 Norris spent several years as a war correspondent in
South Africa (1895–96) and Cuba (1898).
II.
1)
2)
His masterpiece: The Octopus
It illustrates how social and economic conditions
ruined the lives of innocent, powerless people.
The railroad reached out its millions of tentacles ,
coiling round the throats of the farmers who had no
alternative but to choose between leaving their crops
to rot and carting them out through the railroad at a
capriciously exorbitant freight rate, in either case
ending up in bankruptcy and destruction; and what is
worse, the railroad raises the price of the land, which it
has rented for the people so that all the farmers and the
poor in general face stark destitution and ruin.
Homework:
Search for Dreiser’s personal
information and report to the class.
Read his masterpiece An American
Strategy and report it’s plot summary
and main themes to the class next time.