Contents contents introduction characteristics of naturalism influence of Naturalism on American literature Zola's work and naturalism 10 Ancient and medieval philosophy 16 Modern philosophy 18 conclusion 21 glossary 24 references 26

Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser 1871—1945) was one of the outstanding American writers of naturalism. He was the leading figure in a national literary movement that replaced the observance of Victorian notions of propriety with the unflinching presentation of real-life subject matter. Among other themes, his novels explore the new social problems that had arisen in a rapidly industrializing America. Sinclair Lewis said in his Nobel Prize Lecture of 1930, that Dreiser's great first novel, Sister Carrie, which he dared to publish thirty long years ago and which I read twenty-five years ago, came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman³.
The Summary of Sister Carrie
Sister Carrie tells the story of a rudderless but pretty small-town girl who comes to the big city filled with vague ambitions. She is used by men and uses them in turn to become a successful Broadway actress while George
Hurstwood, the married man who has run away with her, loses his grip on life and descends into beggary and in despair, commits suicide by gassing himself in his hotel room one night. Meanwhile, Carrie achieves stardom, but finds that money and fame do not satisfy her longings or bring her happiness and that nothing will.
Analysis of his work
Dreiser's first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), is a work of pivotal importance in American literature despite its inauspicious launching. It became a beacon to subsequent American writers whose allegiance was to the realistic treatment of any and all subject matter. With the publication of Sister Carrie in 1900, Dreiser committed his literary force to opening the new ground of American naturalism. His heroes and heroines, his settings, his frank discussion, celebration, and humanization of sex, his clear dissection of the mechanistic brutality of American society, all were new and shocking to a reading public reared on genteel romances and adventure narratives. Dreiser received a reputation as a naturalist-barbarian. he has cleared the trail from Victorian and Howellsian timidity and gentility in American fiction to honesty and boldness and passion of life. Sister Carrie was the first masterpiece of the American naturalistic movement in its grittily factual presentation of the vagaries of urban life and in its ingenuous heroine, who goes unpunished for her transgressions against conventional sexual morality. Dreiser does not forget the basic principles of his naturalism. On the one hand, the author says that "the world only moves forward because of the services of the exceptional individual". But on the other hand, Hurstwood is also a "chessman" of fate. Like Carrie, her success is mostly the result of chance. Indeed, though turn-of-the-century readers found Dreiser’s point of view crude and immoral, his influence on the fiction of the first quarter of the century is perhaps greater than any other writer’s.
Hemingway
Hemingway (1899-1961) was also one of the outstanding American writers with naturalistic tendency. He was known as what Gertrude Stein had called “a lost generation.” His works have sometimes been read as an essentially negative commentary on a modern world filled with sterility, inevitable failure and death, which is just the view of naturalism. His primary concern was an individual’s “moment of truth,” and his fascination with the threat of physical emotional, or psychic death is reflected in his lifelong preoccupation with stories of war A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway’s stature as a writer was confirmed with the publication of A Farewell to Arms, which portrayed a farewell both to war and to love. Hemingway had rejected the romantic ideal of the ultimate unity of lovers, suggesting instead that all relationship must end in death. The Old Man and the Sea centered upon Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who struggled with a giant marlin and sharks far out in the Gulf Stream. He ended up with a defeat that the sharps ate the giant marlin which he pulled onto his skiff’s side and stabbed with all his strength. From portraying Santiago’s images, the novel embodies obviously environmental determinism. Human beings can react toward the exterior but they are helpless before these forces, men and women are overwhelmed by the force of nature. Yet to Hemingway, man’s great achievement is to show grace under pressure. There is no another American influence the American people more than Ernest Hemingway. The inside of Hemingway's books, is the spirit of the whole nation. He has great influence on his fellow authors, such as J. D. Salinger , Hunter S. Thompson, Elmore Leonard,etc.

2. 
   Zola's work and naturalism
   

Hundreds of books and articles have been written about the life and work of Emile Zola. In this work, only naturalism in the work of this writer and his main work, the cycle of novels Rougon-Macquart, will be considered. For analysis, I chose the novel «Nana», as it was the first novel by Zola that I read. I was then a teenager of 13 years old. And he left an indelible impression on my soul.
Emile Zola is one of the greatest writers of the 19th century, the author of more than twenty novels, the creator of a new trend in literature – naturalism. “The greatest lyricist of our time,” said Anatole France about Emile Zola. The work of Emile Zola amazes us with its grace and purposefulness. Zola is an artist of large, boundless canvases. The scope of one book, one novel was too small for him, and therefore he combined his works into huge cycles and series. Rougon-Macquarts, Three Cities, Four Gospels, five novels written in his youth, collections of short stories, essays and articles – all this is easy to list in a few words, but behind all this are years of hard work, dozens of hefty volumes⁴.
A writer of exceptional diligence, Zola believed in his vocation, believed in the correctness of the chosen path. He was 28 years old when he began work on Rougon-Macquarts, 53 years old when he completed it. Thousands of obstacles stood in his way, many difficulties had to be overcome, but the writer persistently walked towards the goal. Zola's life, outwardly not rich in events, is full of great creative tension and struggle.He passionately hated and passionately loved, and even in his youth he proclaimed the sanctity of hatred for everything that oppresses, breaks, and cripples life. “Hatred is sacred,” wrote Zola. “Hatred is the indignation of strong and powerful hearts, it is the militant contempt of those in whom vulgarity and stupidity arouses indignation. To hate means to love, it means to feel in oneself an ardent and courageous soul, it means to deeply feel disgust for what is shameful and stupid.
Zola's work is full of contradictions. It seemed to him that in the conditions of the rapid progress of science, the realistic method in art should be limited to scientific theory, but under the scientific method in literature, Zola meant the mechanical transfer of the laws of nature to the social relations of people. His theoretical views were based on blind admiration for the fact, for the document; he exaggerated the role of the biological principle in human life, in the life of society. Nevertheless, in his best works, Zola invariably retained a sense of proportion, overcoming the limitations of his theoretical views, and created works that were strong with life's truth and innovation⁵.
The works of Zola are a whole world in which almost half a century of the history of bourgeois France is reflected. “To show the novel a new path, introducing into it a description and analysis of modern economic giants and their influence on the character and fate of people, was a bold decision,” Paul Lafargue wrote about Zola’s novels. “One attempt to implement this decision makes Zola an innovator and places him in a special, prominent place in our modern literature.”
Since 1862, Zola's judgments about literature have been reflected in numerous articles. Zola's speeches in the periodicals of the 60s are many-sided and unequal. Zola practically did not leave journalism until the end of his days, responding to all the most important events. Zola's journal and newspaper heritage is enormous. The writer himself cared little about collecting it completely.
In 1864, Zola collected stories written by him at different times and published them under the general title «Tales of Ninon». The book was a success and became an important creative milestone in the life of the young Zola. They were followed by the novels Claude's Confession, Testament of the Dead, Secrets of Marseilles.
In 1867, Zol published a new novel – «Teresa Raquin», which declares his commitment to a new literary school – naturalism. Soon the writer becomes the head of this school.
The initial period of Zola's work is a whole decade of searching and hard work, these are talented works that may not have made an era in French literature, but were highly appreciated by his contemporaries.
The main meaning of the aesthetic searches of Zola in 1862-1867.- a statement on the positions of realism, however, a kind of statement, allowing you to gradually cost your own original creative program.
As has been noted more than once, the renewal of art occurs with the emergence of a new term. Such a key concept for Emile Zola was «naturalism», formed from the word Natura – Nature. But after all, all poets and artists swore in love and fidelity to Nature. Didn't the romantics paint the beauties of landscapes? Doesn't Balzac have enough magnificent landscapes against which the events in the «Human Comedy» take place? But Zola's interpretation of the natural principle is completely different. For writers of past generations, nature surrounded the characters, was caring for them or, on the contrary, harsh. But the natural principle dominated outside. Zola, on the other hand, moved the center of gravity inward, the personality itself became the bearer of the laws of nature, the individual person took his place in the continuous chain of biological evolution..
Even before the publication of his first book, Tales of Ninon (1864), the writer for the first time formulated his thoughts on three ways of depicting reality: classical, romantic and realistic. Between the artist and the reality depicted by him, according to Zola, there is always something like a screen – this is the method used by this or that artist. In the classics, he notes the sharpness of outlines, the exaggeration of what he saw, the monotony of colors. The «screen» of the romantic school is like a prism that refracts rays. Zola prefers the realistic school, which gives the most accurate reproduction of life. In this case, the «screen» can be compared to transparent glass.
Zola gradually develops views on art and the tasks of the artist, which he later, in the 80s, will clearly formulate in his main theoretical works – “Experimental Novel”, “Natural Novelists”, etc. But, it will be time when the writer will receive universal recognition of the meter of naturalism when some provisions of his theory seriously interfere with his artistic practice. Another thing is the 60s. There is much appeal in the theoretical views of the young Zola, they are devoid of the one-sidedness and dogmatism that we find in later works.
Giving preference to realistic art, Zola many times returns to the question of the relationship between objective and subjective principles in creativity.Realistic art is objective, it reproduces reality without distortion, but what is the role of the artist as a person with certain psychological characteristics, or, as Zola puts it, temperament? What brings diversity to realistic art, what distinguishes one writer from another? Solving this issue, Zola puts forward the formula: «A work of art is a corner of reality, perceived through the prism of the artist's temperament.»
The question of the significance of the artist's temperament was important to Zola not only from the point of view of the psychology of creativity. Claiming the role of the subjective factor in art, Zola expressed his opposition to the official art of the Second Empire, defended the right of the artist to independently judge life independently.⁶
Beginning in 1867, Zola spoke less and less about the subjective principle in his work. He does not deny the role of the artist's temperament in art, but the most important thing for him seems to be an objective study of life, in which the artist, like the scientist, does not have to express his attitude to the subject under study. At this time, Zola's theoretical views on art were almost completely determined and will be developed by him later, in articles of the 80s. At the same time, his political, anti-Bonapartist views are completed. Zola enters a period of her creative maturity.
Let us dwell on the naturalistic theory, which Zola preached with such passion and which made him, in the eyes of his contemporaries, the recognized head of the naturalistic school. For Zola himself, «naturalism» and «realism» are coinciding concepts. He distinguishes three main literary trends, successively replacing one another: classicism, romanticism and naturalism. He criticizes the representatives of classicism and romanticism for the conventionality of images and situations, for their rhetoric, for their departure from the truth of life. This criticism is based in Zola on a historical basis. In the collection Naturalism in the Theatre, he wrote that classicism and romanticism arose due to certain laws of social life. The formulas created by classicism corresponded to the spirit of the time, and geniuses supported these formulas with their exemplary works.
The emergence of romanticism, according to Zola, meant a certain progress in art, because romanticism provided the artist with greater creative freedom and thus brought him closer to life. But romanticism has outlived its time, as exaggeration and rhetoric prevailed in it over the truth. These two directions were replaced by naturalism, which existed before, but was able to become the leading trend in art. Zola makes an important conclusion: naturalism is based on the artist's desire to display the truth of life⁷.
Zola considered the term «naturalism» in its natural scientific meaning and understood it as the study of nature. In relation to literature, this concept meant for him the same thing as realism, that is, a truthful reflection of reality in its entirety.Zola believed that literature should be akin to science. Its task is to study the facts and be based not on imagination, but on analysis, on the patient collection of «human documents», that is, it should be similar to scientific research. In addition, Zola believed that there are no forbidden topics for a writer, he has the right to invade the darkest and basest spheres of human existence, since only reality in all its undisguised truth gives him inspiration. Zola understood naturalism as the truth in art, although this is not the same thing.
The writer also argued that human society is no different from the animal world and people are completely dependent on their biological essence. He literally blew up a well-meaning society with the statement that a person is driven by instincts and all his actions are completely and completely determined by biological factors.
However, in his artistic work, the writer did not always follow this theory of his, since life turned out to be richer, and the talented writer could not help but feel the contradictions that lay in his favorite method.
Zola sees his contribution to literature in enriching realism with theory, putting it on «scientific foundations», and creating an «experimental novel». It is with this that Zola's departure from realism begins: having mastered the philosophical provisions of positivism, Zola tries to mechanically transfer the laws of biological science to art. His statement is known that it is enough for a novelist to collect documents for a future novel, and then «the novel will be written by itself.» The novelist only has to arrange the facts logically.» (Experimental novel). Zola developed a methodology for collecting documents, advocated the artist's intrusion into any area of ​​life, but, ultimately, came to the establishment of positivist objectivism. In the theoretical works of the 1970s and 1980s, Zola mentions less and less about the role of the subjective factor in art. Worship of the document, the fact leads him to a distortion of the realistic concept of the typical, to belittle the role of the artist, who is called upon to creatively generalize and evaluate the facts of reality he has collected.According to Zola, the writer, as it were, experiments with «experimental» characters. He makes the characters dependent on the environment and heredity and, within the given conditions, studies their behavior. Such a view of the image of a literary character was a departure from the principles of realism, because the artist in this case had to come not from life, but from a formula invented in advance. Seizing on the theory of heredity, exaggerating its significance, Zola thought he had found a reliable way to bridge the gap between science and art. Without denying the significance of the laws of social life, he equated them with the laws of the physiological existence of man. So, along with objectivism in the naturalistic theory of Zola, an unreasonable exaggeration of the role of physiological processes that determine human behavior appeared.
Zola was stubborn in his desire to create not only a social epic, but also to prove the exceptional influence of physiological laws on human psychology. Some of his novels of the Rougon-Macquart series he devoted almost entirely to the problems of physiology, and then there were such, to varying degrees, artistically inferior works as The Beast Man (1890), Doctor Pascal (1983)⁸.
3.Ancient and medieval philosophy
Naturalism is most notably a Western phenomenon, but an equivalent idea has long existed in the East. Naturalism was the foundation of two out of six orthodox schools and one heterodox school of Hinduism.[5][6] Samkhya, one of the oldest schools of Indian philosophy puts nature (Prakriti) as the primary cause of the universe, without assuming the existence of a personal God or Ishwara. The Carvaka, Nyaya, Vaisheshika schools originated in the 7th, 6th, and 2nd century BCE, respectively.[7] Similarly, though unnamed and never articulated into a coherent system, one tradition within Confucian philosophy embraced a form of Naturalism dating to the Wang Chong in the 1st century, if not earlier, but it arose independently and had little influence on the development of modern naturalist philosophy or on Eastern or Western culture.
Western metaphysical naturalism originated in ancient Greek philosophy. The earliest pre-Socratic philosophers, especially the Milesians (Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes) and the atomists (Leucippus and Democritus), were labeled by their peers and successors «the physikoi» (from the Greek φυσικός or physikos, meaning «natural philosopher» borrowing on the word φύσις or physis, meaning «nature») because they investigated natural causes, often excluding any role for gods in the creation or operation of the world. This eventually led to fully developed systems such as Epicureanism, which sought to explain everything that exists as the product of atoms falling and swerving in a void⁹.
Aristotle surveyed the thought of his predecessors and conceived of nature in a way that charted a middle course between their excesses.
Plato's world of eternal and unchanging Forms, imperfectly represented in matter by a divine Artisan, contrasts sharply with the various mechanistic Weltanschauungen, of which atomism was, by the fourth century at least, the most prominent… This debate was to persist throughout the ancient world. Atomistic mechanism got a shot in the arm from Epicurus… while the Stoics adopted a divine teleology… The choice seems simple: either show how a structured, regular world could arise out of undirected processes, or inject intelligence into the system. This was how Aristotle… when still a young acolyte of Plato, saw matters. Cicero… preserves Aristotle's own cave-image: if troglodytes were brought on a sudden into the upper world, they would immediately suppose it to have been intelligently arranged. But Aristotle grew to abandon this view; although he believes in a divine being, the Prime Mover is not the efficient cause of action in the Universe, and plays no part in constructing or arranging it… But, although he rejects the divine Artificer, Aristotle does not resort to a pure mechanism of random forces. Instead he seeks to find a middle way between the two positions, one which relies heavily on the notion of Nature, or phusis.
With the rise and dominance of Christianity in the West and the later spread of Islam, metaphysical naturalism was generally abandoned by intellectuals. Thus, there is little evidence for it in medieval philosophy. The reintroduction of Aristotle's empirical epistemology as well as previously lost treatises by Greco-Roman natural philosophers which was begun by the medieval Scholastics without resulting in any noticeable increase in commitment to naturalism¹⁰.
4. Modern philosophy
It was not until the early modern era of philosophy and the Age of Enlightenment that naturalists like Benedict Spinoza (who put forward a theory of psychophysical parallelism), David Hume and the proponents of French materialism (notably Denis Diderot, Julien La Mettrie, and Baron d'Holbach) started to emerge again in the 17th and 18th centuries. In this period, some metaphysical naturalists adhered to a distinct doctrine, materialism, which became the dominant category of metaphysical naturalism widely defended until the end of the 19th century.
Immanuel Kant rejected (reductionist) materialist positions in metaphysics, but he was not hostile to naturalism. His transcendental philosophy is considered to be a form of liberal naturalism.
In late modern philosophy, Naturphilosophie, a form of natural philosophy, was developed by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as an attempt to comprehend nature in its totality and to outline its general theoretical structure.
A version of naturalism that arose after Hegel was Ludwig Feuerbach's anthropological materialism, which influenced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's historical materialism, Engels's "materialist dialectic" philosophy of nature (Dialectics of Nature), and their follower Georgi Plekhanov's dialectical materialism.
Another notable school of late modern philosophy advocating naturalism was German materialism: members included Ludwig Büchner, Jacob Moleschott, and Carl Vogt.
The current usage of the term naturalism "derives from debates in America in the first half of the 20th century. The self-proclaimed 'naturalists' from that period included John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook and Roy Wood Sellars.