Conclusion glossary referece

2.The Postmodernist Neo-Historicist Reassessment of American Literary Naturalism

Late-twentieth-century critics have displayed a high degree of interest for realism and naturalism, which they approach from a new, often skeptical perspective. Realism and naturalism have indeed been the object of a thorough reassessment in the 1980s and ’90s, based on theories of discourse developed within the framework of postmodernism, poststructuralism, and neo-Marxism. More specifically, naturalism has been an important topic of analysis for neo-historicist theoreticians focusing the interface of culture and history—Walter Benn Michaels, June Howard, Amy Kaplan, and Mark Seltzer.
One of the main topics thus re-evaluated has been the politics of naturalism, which had, according to the traditional definition been described as progressive. Neo-Marxist and neohistoricist critics, on the contrary, raise the question whether American naturalism truly criticizes capitalism or whether, on the contrary it might not covertly or even explicitly celebrate it.
Neo-Marxists and neo-historicists also wonder how American naturalism could have been regarded as a liberal or left-wing literary movement when it often articulates sexist and racist rhetoric. Indeed, Frank Norris’s and Jack London’s fiction includes a celebration of masculinity mingled with conspicuously racist accents. Similarly, because of its anchorage in late-nineteenth-century evolutionary science, naturalism appropriates the discourses of scientific racism and the outlook of social Darwinismg, which has often been used to legitimize conservatism and individualistic capitalism.
Naturalism scholarship as of the 1980s also raises questions about the status of naturalism as a genre:

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  Is naturalism merely a variant of realism or a separate genre?
  

Particularly, is it a hybrid form of the romance? Frank Norris himself viewed Zola’s naturalism as an offshoot of the romance—a romantic mode of realism.

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  Can naturalism be circumscribed chronologically?
  

If one focuses on the discursive features of realist and naturalist novels, one is led to ascribe more flexible chronological boundaries to those literary movements than those delineated by the traditional definitions. One may indeed be tempted to consider that naturalism existed before Zola. In this logic, Zola merely gave a name to a pre-existing literary discourse. Flaubert is sometimes included in the naturalist canon, and Balzac’s literary project (“La comédie humaine”) shows striking similarities with Zola’s literary panorama of late-nineteenth-century France. Likewise, we have seen that in US literature, Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills” is strikingly similar to naturalist depictions of industry. One may even wonder whether there might not be a continuous tradition of naturalism up to the present. Naturalism scholar Donald Pizer argues compellingly that late-twentieth-century novelists such as Paul Auster and Don DeLillo might qualify as contemporary naturalists.
Taking into account the critical reassessment of which naturalism has been the object, it is possible to venture a new definition of this literary practice. In what follows, we shall attempt to define naturalism in socio-cognitive terms—as a function of the writer’s or the text’s horizon of sociological perception. This definition is based on the assumption that realism developed as a literary practice that responded to the development of a new social context—the rise of urban-industrialization. This definition also makes it possible to circumscribe the stylistic features of naturalism and the shape of its historical development in more flexible terms than was feasible under the traditional definition.
According to this socio-cognitive definition, we must distinguish classic realism and naturalism proper on the basis of their respective capacities to grasp a more or less broad or deep segment of the new urban world.
“Classic realism” in this perspective is the realism of the “knowable community. Such a definition acknowledges the fact that the realist gaze—the capacity to survey, analyze, and
represent the social world—is always subjected to ideological limitations: no author or text can avail themselves of a neutrally omniscient grasp of the social field. As Georg Lukács puts it, members of every social group at a given historical period possess their “possible consciousness”—their cognitive horizon, limiting their capacity to develop their knowledge of social conditions. Lukács, on the basis of Hegel’s and
Marx’s philosophies of history, argues that each group’s scope of sociological perception varies according to specific historical situations. This implies that breadth and depth of the realist gaze is bounded by ideological limits varying according to concrete circumstances.
The area encompassed by the realist gaze may indeed be called the “knowable community.” This term is borrowed from British sociologist of culture Raymond Williams and from critics of realism Georg Lukács and Amy Kaplan. In literature and other arts, the knowable community often takes the form of the family (hence the huge corpus of familycentered novels, films, TV series), the neighborhood, or the workplace .
The task of classical realism in this perspective consists not only in representing this familiar universe, but in demystifying it. Since the social area of the knowable community is limited, one expects the novelist to be able to analyze it in depth—i.e. to portray it critically. If this critical edge were absent, the representation of the knowable community would relapse into romance and sentimentalism
Compared to classic realism, which focuses on the perimeter of social interaction familiar to the writer, naturalism attempts to portray the totality of the social field— in many cases the whole expanse of the urban world. Therefore, naturalism is bound to represent what film critic James Naremore felicitously calls the “social fantastic”—the less familiar, grotesque, or threatening areas of social life
By the same token, naturalist works assume that there is an element of irreducible strangeness in social life. This awareness of the uncanny dimension of social interactions is the root of the philosophical pessimism that characterizes naturalism: the survey of social conditions practiced by naturalist texts stumbles against this element of irreducible otherness: its mapping is never complete. In late-nineteenth-century naturalism, for instance characters are described as being motivated by irrepressible atavistic instincts. These atavistic impulses remain mysterious and unmanageable. They confer a grotesque, uncanny aura to the characters in question.
Since naturalism focuses on the unfamiliar, it cannot restrict itself to a coherent documentary style, as the realism of the knowable community is able to do. Indeed, highly unfamiliar scenes cannot be represented by means of plain, analytical descriptions. Such scenes are likely to lapse into the gothic or romance. Therefore, naturalist novels tend to be far more stylistically heterogeneous than classic realist texts. This heterogeneity is sometimes considered an aesthetic flaw—a lack of realistic consistency.
Similarly, naturalism relies on metaphors and symbolism in order to hint at aspects of the social world that cannot be analyzed by means of the realist gaze. Roman Jakobson argues that realism is a literary discourse based on metonymy—i.e. on descriptions that survey objects associated by links of temporal, spatial, or causal proximity. Realist descriptions indeed obey this logic: they move from one element to the next—in space, in time, and in terms of causality. The naturalist depiction of the social fantastic cannot always resort to this rational logic. Therefore, they must hint at mysterious phenomena by indirect means—notably by means of metaphors.One essential aspect of the socio-cognitive definition of realism and naturalism consists in the fact that the realism of the knowable community and naturalism are not mutually exclusive: they coexist during the same historical periods, or as components of the same texts: there are naturalist elements in Wharton’s The House of Mirth, even though most of the novel follows the logic of the realism of the knowable community. Likewise, there are moments of classic documentary realism in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. If the latter novel were entirely devoted to the rhetoric of the unfamiliar it would be a romance pure and simple. Thus, in order to be fully accurate, one should therefore be aware of the fact that each of these texts features a realist or a naturalist dominant.
On this basis, it becomes possible to elaborate transhistorical definitions of realism and naturalism—definitions of these literary practices that do not limit each of them to narrowly defined chronological boundaries. Wharton is mostly a classic realist, though she published her novels after Crane and Norris, and at the same time as Dreiser. By the same token, Conversely, Sinclair Lewis is a classical realist who published his works during the 1920s, the modernist decades.
In this logic, we may sketch out a transhistorical tradition of “classic’ realism that stretches from the 19^th century to the present:
Jane Austen; Henry James’s early novels; William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton; utopian fiction; Sinclair Lewis; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Nella Larsen; “golden age” detective fiction; John Updike; Raymond Carver; Woody Allen …
Likewise, we may define a transhistorical corpus of naturalist writers, perpetuating itself into the modernist and the postmodernist decades:
Flaubert; Rebecca Harding Davis; Crane; Norris; Dreiser; London; Upton Sinclair; D. H. Lawrence; Dos Passos; Hemingway; Richard Wright; Raymond Chandler; film noir; anti-utopian novels; Thomas Pynchon; Don DeLillo; cyberpunk science-fiction …
If we restrict our scope to US literature before WWII, the corpora of classical realism and naturalism include the following authors, ranked by decades:
American Realists: fiction of the knowable community:
1880s: William Dean Howells; Henry James; Edward Bellamy. 1890s: Sarah Orne Jewett; Kate Chopin (local color, protomodernist); Charles Chesnutt; H. B. Fuller and Robert Herrick ; Hamlin Garland, Abraham Cahan 1900s: Edith Wharton 1910s: David Graham Phillips 1920s: Sinclair Lewis; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Nella Larsen
American Naturalists: fiction of the knowable community and of the social fantastic:
1860s: Rebecca Harding Davis 1880s : Mark Twain 1890s: Stephen Crane; Frank Norris; Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1900s: Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Upton Sinclair

1910s: Willa Cather; James Weldon Johnson; W. E. B. Dubois; Charlotte Teller, Arthur Bullard, Ernest Poole; Abraham Cahan 1920s: Ernest Hemingway; John Dos Passos

Dreiser was born B. 1871 in Terre Haute, Indiana, in a German catholic household. The family lived in near-poverty, and endorsed what a few biographers call “non -Victorian” moral standards. One of Dreiser’s sisters had an affair out of wedlock. She probably served as inspiration for Carrie Meeber in Sister Carrie.
Dreiser’s uncle, Paul Dresser, was a famous composer of popular songs. As a successful cultural entrepreneur, Paul Dresser served as model for Theodore Dreiser’s career. Dreiser finished high school and spent a year at Indiana University. He did not graduate. He read science and philosophy, hence rapidly becoming skeptical of religion. As a young man, Dreiser did some newspaper work in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York. He met Sarah Osborn White at the 1893 Chicago World Fair and married her.
In 1900, he published Sister Carrie. The novel proved controversial from the very first. The publisher (Doubleday), fearing censorship, refused to give it adequate promotion, even though the novel had been recommended by successful naturalist novelist Frank Norris. As a result of Carrie’s partial failure, Dreiser suffered a nervous breakdown. This experience is chronicled in his autobiographical narrative An Amateur Laborer. It is also given a fictional shape in The “Genius,” a partly autobiographical novel of artistic education. Still uncertain of his prospects as a novelist, Dreiser worked as editor for a fashion-oriented magazine for a time.
His second novel, Jennie Gerhardt-another “fallen-woman” narrative—was a critical success. He then started writing what would later be called “The Trilogy of Desire.” This term refers to the sequence of novels composed of The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic. In these texts, Dreiser depicts the career of a ruthless businessman. The novels are written from a Nietzschean, apparently pro-capitalist perspective, therefore partly contradicting the image of Dreiser as a left-wing writer.
The publication of The “Genius” in 1917 triggered another censorship scandal: the partly autobiographical work contains sexually frank descriptions of the protagonist’s failed marriage and of his affair with a young woman. The novel reflects the crisis of his first marriage, which ended in divorce. He later married silent film actress Helen Patges-Richardson and moved with her to California. Dreiser’s autobiographical writings contain very explicit depictions of this new relationship.