Download Unit 1: American Realism and Naturalism The period post Civil War

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Unit 1: American Realism and Naturalism
The period post Civil War until around 1910.
The general purpose of this lecture is to describe the literary-historical “context” that will
inform your reading of our representative authors from the Realism-Naturalism period. I
will represent this context in terms of an umbrella “proposition”. This proposition is our
means for encompassing the authorial projects characteristic of this period. More
precisely, the proposition is offered to orient your reading such that you recognize the
attentiveness shared by the authors as a group while you analyze the specific vision and
accomplishment of each author.
Proposition: Individuals and Collectivities are defined as much by how they are situated
in the world as by their individual-person or collective-group designations.
The proposition emphasizes that, in order to understand a person or even a group of
people, we must identify the forces that govern how they live, and also the urgencies that
motivate their behavior and their emotions. Much of the literature in this period is thus
concerned—and nearly always critically so—with those humanity-shaping conditions
that determine the recognizable paths of human experience, including the pathways of
self-reflection and social consciousness.
There are many ways to conceive these “humanity-shaping conditions”. For the purposes
of our course, I’ve organized some of the more notable conceptualizations into three
categories.
1. Material Conditions
a.
b.
c.
d.
Urbanization
Technical Innovation
Corporate Capitalism
14 Million Immigrants
Material conditions are those that are physically or inferentially present to the five
senses, and thus create, we might say, the “feel” of our environment. Notice, for
example, that “urbanization” condenses larger numbers of people into more
confined spaces; that technical innovation connects people to machines in a
tightly organized manufacturing space; that corporate capitalism sediments
workers in hierarchies determined by a human being’s productive function; that
the arrival of 14 million immigrants—although it enriches public space with
ethnic, racial, and cultural difference—launches a competition to use and even
exploit these human resources for amassing corporate wealth and securing
political power.
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UniversityExtension
E338
Unit1
2. Forces of Human Destiny
a.
b.
c.
d.
Will to Power (existential)
Ambition to Compete (economic)
Erotic Desire (sexual drive)
Psychology of Self-Reflection (aesthetics of moral judgment)
The determinative forces of human destiny are those that impel us to act, think, or
feel in a certain way, that exist within us as “drives” to which we surrender
ourselves or, perhaps, against which we try to resist. This is the subject of
category 2. Notice, for example, that such drives can be construed as existentially
self-aggrandizing (the self understood as its drive for survival) or economically
self-aggrandizing (the self understood on the basis of the power it wields over
others). Yet drives can also be understood as occurring at the poles of human selfreflection: as a sexual drive akin to animal instinct itself; or as the drive for a selfawareness that will enable a person to discover her or his immanent virtue and
thereby generate a moral vision both truthful and beautiful.
3. Effects and Consequences for Cultural Values and Social Practices
a.
b.
c.
d.
Homogeneity
National Consciousness
Mass Print Culture
Imperialist Geo-Politics
Unlike the first two categories, this third category focuses upon the broad social
effects and value-laden consequences created by the pervasive influence of
material conditions and determinative forces on lived life. Notice that all these
effects tend to diminish the fact and effectiveness of individuality: that people
share routine qualities of humanness that are more decisive than any individual
gifts they may possess; that “nationhood” appears to be the embodiment of a
singular national consciousness that trumps the particularities and silences the
voices of specific groups; that what is popularly published and the way we read
together bespeak a uniformity of cultural vision and social practice, and thereby
inculcate the “norms” by which we are supposed live; that “progress”—on both
individual and national levels—requires conquest, expansion, and the general
projection of national power.
The writers represented in Unit 1 are in part famous because they insightfully and
critically address the urgent questions—of conduct, value, and belief—that attend the
fact, the operations, and the effects of those conditions and forces that situate us in the
world and thereby shape our experience of the world. To assist your interpretive work,
then, I have framed the overarching concerns of this literary period in terms of literary
projects, that is, the efforts of authors who seek better to understand how the world works
and how self-consciously to live in it.
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