PROMPT 1

As we discussed in class, Naturalism seems invested in a special mode of narrative observation; this fascination seems to trouble the stable literary perspective we might often take for granted.
This interest in "observation" shapes the text at the level of "style" but also at the level of plot.

Use either Open Boat or McTeague as your source text to argue how methods of observation, watching, or even simply "eavesdropping" figure into the text at the level of plot and shape both the narrative and the style of the text.

Remember, beyond finding instances of what you might consider literary "observation" (and that can be a wide range of examples) in the text, please try to make an argument about their importance in relationship to the text and the larger concerns of the period---primitivism, naturalism, technology, etc. A good paper won't address every instance, but rather make a coherent argument from the most important evidence it finds in the text.

Fiction in Naturalism (Remember to sign your comments!)

"Did that wonderful service of gold exist outside of her diseased imagination?...
It was not impossible..."


Consider the subplot of Zerkow & Maria Macapa: what is the role of stories/fictions/myth in naturalist texts? We encountered some already in The Open Boat--Why is Zerkow interested? What does he have Maria do? Consider repetition wherever you encounter it in the text....

McTeague & Gender

"Perhaps he dimly saw that this must be so, that it belonged to the changeless order of things--the man desiring the woman only for what she withholds; the woman worshipping the man for that which she yields up to him" (84).

Consider the courting process in McTeague, its attitude towards sexuality and gender: what is the role of women in the naturalist text? Remember, Open Boat was a male text....
Also, what is the logic (or calculus) of sexuality and desire? From where does it derive and to where does it lead? Do we hear about this logic in society today?

McTeague

With any great work of fiction--especially one created by an artist invested in style--we can begin looking at the opening paragraphs to judge how the book wants to be read:

It was Sunday, and, according to his custom on that day....


What stylistic features about this intro might we want to point out?




& Why does the story begin on Sunday?

CRANE NATURALISM & NEITZSCHE

The Age of the Primitive-Modern is in part a profound encounter with forces of science--specifically Darwinism--that had never been allowed into the realm of art.

In what ways does Crane's story register these changes? At the level of plot, style, dialogue?

Is there a framing device for this story as we had in Chesnutt?
That is, do we encounter the Neitzschean dialectic once again?


You might want to consider that conservative critics of the time argued that "naturalism"
and everything it embodied was the result of a dangerous Neitzscheanism pervading America....

Is it?

NATURALISM & CRANE

The term naturalism describes a type of literature that attempts to apply scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings. Unlike realism, which focuses on literary technique, naturalism implies a philosophical position: for naturalistic writers, since human beings are, in Emile Zola's phrase, "human beasts," characters can be studied through their relationships to their surroundings. Zola's 1880 description of this method in Le roman experimental (The Experimental Novel, 1880) follows Claude Bernard's medical model and the historian Hippolyte Taine's observation that "virtue and vice are products like vitriol and sugar"--that is, that human beings as "products" should be studied impartially, without moralizing about their natures. Other influences on American naturalists include Herbert Spencer and Joseph LeConte.

Through this objective study of human beings, naturalistic writers believed that the laws behind the forces that govern human lives might be studied and understood. Naturalistic writers thus used a version of the scientific method to write their novels; they studied human beings governed by their instincts and passions as well as the ways in which the characters' lives were governed by forces of heredity and environment. Although they used the techniques of accumulating detail pioneered by the realists, the naturalists thus had a specific object in mind when they chose the segment of reality that they wished to convey.

In George Becker's famous and much-annotated and contested phrase, naturalism's philosophical framework can be simply described as "pessimistic materialistic determinism." Another such concise definition appears in the introduction to American Realism: New Essays. In that piece,"The Country of the Blue," Eric Sundquist comments, "Revelling in the extraordinary, the excessive, and the grotesque in order to reveal the immutable bestiality of Man in Nature, naturalism dramatizes the loss of individuality at a physiological level by making a Calvinism without God its determining order and violent death its utopia" (13).

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