LIT2120 World Literature

Spring 2005

Check the Assignments Page and the Discussion Forum regularly

Week 7: 22 February to 27 February, 2005
Read Charles Baudelaire Excerpts from “Paris Spleen” (1395), Paul Verlaine “The Art of Poetry” (1409). "Symbol Eyes" on Discussions.

Week 8: 1 March to 6 March, 2005
Midterm week: Read Ghalib’s poems (1066) and contemplate the things you have done - - oh, and do the Midterm essay. "Open Forum" on Discussions.

Week 9: 8 March to 13 March, 2005
Read Anton Chekhov The Lady with the Dog (1524). "Lady or the Dog?" on Discussions.

Assignment #4, the Midterm Essay due on Sunday, 13 March at 11:55p EST (See Assignments Page).

As a writer myself, I feel that a writer’s job is to portray humans as accurately as possible, in all their complexity. A story should not just “tell” what people are like; it should “show” them in action. Similarly, the reader should work as hard to figure out a fictional personality as that of a stranger met on the street. It is that true-but-unreal “imitation” that fiction tries to create. I have no doubts that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writers saw the misery in the general population and tried to put that into fiction. The results were what we now call “Realism.”

Even today, people often think literature should only show ordered perfection. Fairy tales do that. They show what life should and would be like if everything were perfect. Writers of the time, though, imagined another purpose for literature. If they could imitate the true misery of real life, perhaps it would shock people into a realization of that misery and force them to change. This, too, could be a goal of literature. It became known as a Marxist view, and it is still common today. It addresses the idea that art should serve some political or social end. It results in those speeches at the Academy Awards about “causes”, and such views as that of Tom Hanks, who I mentioned earlier. Those individual believe that art should not only “delight and educate,” as Horace put it, but also address social ills.

These two views, art as a beauty and art as a social force, are separate and distinct perspectives, and I often ask students to identify what their own perspective is on art (literature, film, video, painting, sculpture). Very rarely does anyone really expect art to “just entertain.”

The Growth of Science

Darwin provided a direct connection between humans and the natural world. His work established the scientific foundation of modern reality. Freud identified connections with the dream world and the acceptance of variations of consciousness. All these changes legitimized the thoughts of diverse individuals as “real.” Since Romantics had already associated the real with the “good,” Realists were faced with the reality that, though it may not be “good,” reality was all humans had. “Except for our dreams and visions,” the Symbolists added.

Helpful Links

• Realism/Naturalism An excellent page by Professor Paul Brians
• Realism/Naturalism A good site, but it is at Tripod, so pop-ups are a problem.

Back to my point, though; once writers accepted the fact that the misery of the world was their source for imitation, realism and naturalism became driving forces, especially in Eastern Europe, where the monarchy maintained its hold the longest.

Realism was the belief that art should imitate, should attempt to create the “real” world. It should reflect the misery, the grittiness, the futility of human experience. That was not to say that art should truly “be” real. Realism was only a movement, a school or group of writers who shared a philosophical belief that the purpose of art was to show that the common person lived in poverty and oppression.

Naturalism, on the other hand, was a specific subset of realism, one that followed the idea of social determinism. Naturalist stories were similar in that they always proved, through their themes, that a person’s actions were a result of social structures that she or he had no control over: Character A was inevitably forced into poverty because the social structure of the time did not allow personal free will to function as it should. These Naturalistic themes are analogous to the current obsession with self-esteem and human potential. Because positive self-esteem was identified as such a force in human development, schools and culture focused on it. Soon, the themes of many commercials and movies highlighted how an average person could triumph over superstar “heroes” if their normal abilities were enhanced by a product like Gatorade or Nike shoes.

"Can Mikey come out and play?" Derek Jeter asks the mom. So Mikey goes out and beats the pants off a superstar. Although this cannot "really" happen, it does give people the idea that "wanting" something badly enough can make it happen.

Such themes have become so common that audiences now accept them as a "truth".