Unit 1 Exam Flashcards
(26 cards)
Self as divine
Ideals of human nature
Nature as teacher = benevolent = meaningful
Spiritual Truths are present
Romanticism (1820s - 1860s)
Common subjects & language/Focus on everyday
Realistic treatment/Objective treatment of external phenomena
Faith in individual w/ autonomous agency
Ethical idealism - what the world should look like
Nature as a setting/Distinct grounding in space & time
Psychological realism - what makes people tick
Realism/Regionalism (1860s - early 1900s)
Uncommon subjects (degradation & poverty)
Pessimistic: determinism via heredity, economics, or environment (if you change environment, you change person & no real human will)
Nature is either hostile or indifferent - survival of the fittest
Arose from post-Darwinian 19th century suggesting humans are just apart of the natural order of the world
Characters from lower levels of society
Naturalism (late 1800s - early 1900s)
influential critic and editor
Wrote using realism
helped a lot of authors get started when he was the editor of the Atlantic Monthly
William Dean Howells (1837 - 1920)
Privileged
Wrote about America despite living most of his life in Europe
Works a lot with narration - using center of consciousness
Wrote using realism
Henry James (1843 - 1916)
main character is romanticizing war
Author may be critiquing how society perceives war
ending (main character being painted) brings up a question about representation
W. D Howells - Editha
Artist drawing the Monarchs - are the Monarchs the “real thing?”
See a lot of photography, novels, painting, drawing, etc. -
Author might be commenting on representation
How do we accurately represent reality in art?
Henry James - The Real Thing
We don’t necessarily need direct experience - still create from experience
Art of re-presenting reality - it is NOT the real thing, but it has an air of it
Wants to move away from author inserting himself as a narrator
“show-don’t-tell”
Henry James - The Art of Fiction
Privileged
Compared stylistically to Henry James
Went thru period of depression - got “rest treatment”
Often criticized the brittleness of the aristocratic world
Edith Wharton (1862 - 1937)
Incredibly wealthy family Class difference b/t Fennos and Quentins Handles genre dialogue incredibly well POV shifts from Mrs. Quentin to Hope at the end - significant? Psychological realism
Edith Wharton - The Quicksand
Author tended to write in “sketches” - convey emotions more than plot
While White Heron has a plot, there is an established mood - nostalgic yearning
“woman’s world” - threat comes from a man
City –> country movement (a backwards move)
Sylvy - little woods child
Sarah Orne Jewett - A White Heron
called the “women’s realism”
trying to capture specific area of the country
natural setting, linguistic & cultural features
try to preserve the values of a region in the wake of social changes
Jewett - “local-color writing”
a question on marriage
another option for women OTHER than marriage
Louisa is CONTENT to be single - important
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman - A New-England Nun”
Banned in 1885 after it was published
Considered the greatest american novel by some
Set before Civil War (total shift in worldview)
Struggle b/t “civilization” and “wildness”
Narrator: 14 yr old boy
See changes in narrator as he becomes friends w/ slave - what is author saying here?
A realist novel, but also a regional novel
The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Huck & Jim
A VERY light-skinned African American (mixed race heritage)
stories often deal w/ intra-racial subjects
Local color author & realist
Known for writing post-Civil War Blacks - often serving their own self interests
Well-liked & popular
Generally wrote to white people**
did not like the “caste”
wanted to “elevate” White audience to teach them
believed interracial marriage was the solution
Charles Chesnutt (1858 - 1932)
emancipation
black males can vote and hold public & political offices
better education
Reconstruction - troops w/drawn in 1875
1876 - rise of the KKK
Question of Black Identity: looking for voice, trying to shape literature
Literature trying to pass values on to and preserve culture for Blacks
Post-Civil War America + Literature
dialects & blending of religions
Uncle Julius & Grandison are both significant figures - smart, tricksters, breaking stereotypes of the Black man/woman**
Chesnutt - The Goophered Grapevine” & “The Passing of Grandison”
Russian Jew
Spoke Yiddish
Stays w/in bounds of realism in his stories
Abraham Cahan (1860 - 1951)
not much dialogue deployed in main characters despite their being Russian immigrants
importance of family ties - writing about an extremely impoverished couple that get married despite really having nothing
Cahan - “A Ghetto Wedding”
Often wrote about things that people found immoral - Sister Carrie
Had “courage and integrity in breaking trail as a pioneer in the presentation of fiction of real human beings in a real America”
Theodore Dreiser (1871 - 1945)
also emphasizing family ties
prevalent dialect - German immigrants
view of New York streets is much darker than Cahan’s
even takes us to a house of prostitution
begins to take us into the realms of naturalism - not entirely though b/c Theresa still has a choice in the whole matter
Dreiser - “Butcher Rogaum’s Door”
all about how environment shapes a character
sometimes a clinical treatment of the human body
end is often tragic - we are just pawns to our environment, we aren’t strong enough, nature wipes us out
Literary Naturalism
four men lost at sea
author gives almost animal like qualities to the ocean
the physically strongest man still drowns - chance
author points out that humans still look for meaning in this world
Stephen Crane - “The Open Boat”
turning away from traditional, Biblical models to philosophical determinism
did not see people as morally independent in a Christian universe
our fate is determined by our heredity and environment
humans are without a spark of divinity - therefore there is no need for guilt or to be morally responsible
human autonomy (will) is called into question
American Naturalist Writers
