THURSDAY, 10/16
REALISM
re·al·ism
noun
\ˈrē-ə-ˌli-zəm\
concern for fact or
reality
and rejection
AMERICAN RENAISSANCE/ TRANSCENDENT-ALISM
1840-1860
(Note overlap in time period with Romanticism -- some consider the anti-transcendentalists to be the "dark" romantics or gothic)
Poetry Short Stories Novels Anti-Transcendentalist s *Hold readers’ attention through dread of a series of terrible possibilities *Feature landscapes of dark forests, extreme vegetation, concealed ruins with horrific rooms, depressed characters Transcendentalists:
*True reality is spiritual
*Comes from18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant * Idealists
* Self-reliance & individualism
* Emerson & Thoreau
Anti-Transcendentalists:
* Used symbolism to great effect
*Sin, pain, & evil exist * Poe, Hawthorne, & Melville
Today in literature we still see portrayals of alluring antagonists whose evil
characteristics appeal to one’s sense of awe Today in literature we still see stories of the persecuted young girl forced apart from her true love
Today in literature we still read of people seeking the true beauty in life and in nature … a belief in true love and contentment
Poems and essays of Emerson & Thoreau Thoreau's Walden
Aphorisms of Emerson and Thoreau
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter
Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" and "The Black Cat"
PERIODS Genre/Style Effect/
Aspects Historical Context Examples REALISM 1855-1900 (Period of Civil War and Postwar period) Novels and short stories Objective narrator Does not tell reader how to interpret story Dialogue includes voices from around the country Social realism: aims to change a specific
social problem Aesthetic realism: art that insists on detailing the world as one sees it
Civil War brings demand for a "truer" type of literature that does not
idealize people or places
Writings of Twain, Bierce, Crane
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (some say 1st modern novel)
Regional works like:
The Awakening.Ethan Frome, and My Antonia
Realism Defined/Explored
Broadly defined as "the faithful representation
of reality”…
…it…denotes a particular kind of subject
matter, especially the representation of
middle-class life.
A reaction against romanticism,…
…, realists center their attention to a
Is it Realism or Naturalism?
Many critics have suggested that there is no clear distinction
between realism and its related late nineteenth-century movement, naturalism.
As Donald Pizer notes in his introduction to The Cambridge
Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to
London, the term "realism" is difficult to define, in part because it is used differently in European contexts than in American literature. Pizer suggests that "whatever was being produced in fiction during the 1870s and 1880s that was new, interesting, and roughly similar in a number of ways can be designated as realism, and that an
equally new, interesting, and roughly similar body of writing produced at the turn of the century can be designated as
American Literature
In American literature, the term "realism"
encompasses the period of time from the
Civil War to the turn of the century …
devoted to accurate representation and
an exploration of American lives in various
contexts.
…Amy Kaplan has called realism a
"strategy for imagining and managing the
threats of social change" (
Social
As a movement…
Realism was a movement that
THE ADVENTURES OF
HUCKLEBERRY FINN
Ernest Hemingway said:
"The good writers are Henry James, Stephen
Crane, and Mark Twain. That's not the order
they're good in. There is no order for good
writers.... All modern American literature comes
from one book by Mark Twain called [
The
Huckleberry Finn &
Censorship:
First published in 1884.
Controversial from the start.
1885, Concord Public Library banned it.
Twain on March 18, 1885: "The Committee of the Public
Library of Concord, Mass., have given us a rattling tip-top puff which will go into every paper in the country. They
have expelled Huck from their library as 'trash and suitable only for the slums.' That will sell 25,000 copies for us sure."
1902, Brooklyn Public Library banned The Adventures of
Today:
One of the most challenged books in the U.S.
Debate has centered around the language : objected to on
social grounds. Use of the racial epithet “nigger.”
Yielding to public pressure, some textbook publishers have
substituted "slave" or "servant" for the term that Mark Twain uses in the book.
Alabama publisher in March of 2011 changed the term to “slave”
In an attempt to avoid controversy, CBS produced a
made-for-TV adaptation of the book in 1955 that lacked a single mention of slavery and did not have an African-American portray the character of Jim.
1998: parents in Tempe, Ariz., sued the local high school
over the book's inclusion on a required reading list. The
Yet the issue of how to handle the n-word in the
classroom in a sensitive way persists.
“Add to this the presence in the novel of the most
powerful racial epithet in English—the word
appears 213 times – and it is evident why
Huckleberry Finn legitimately concerns
African-American parents sending their children into
racially mixed classrooms.”
--Allen Carey-Webb, 1993
Solution:
substitution in speech; use the original word from
Why does he use the term?
Realism
Satire
/sat-yr/ * n. 1 the use of humor, irony, or
exaggeration as a form of mockery or
Twain’s Autobiography
What stood out to you?
What were his influences (stated and
implied)?
What type of writer is he based on what
Biography:
1835-1910
1835: born Samuel Clemens in Hannibal, Missouri: banks of the Mississippi,
pre-Civil War
In the 1830s and 1840s, when novel is set, this was the frontier between
North and South.
From a teen, worked as an itinerant newspaperman; intended to travel to
South America…ended up persuading a famous riverboat pilot, Horace Bixby, to teach him the river. Received license after two years, but Civil War put an end to the career.
Pseudonym: Mark Twain: leadsman’s cry meaning a two-fathom sounding, or
“safe water”
1861 Twain traveled West with his brother, a Lincoln supporter. Mining
country, but unsuccessful.
Gained national attention in 1865 from “The Notorious Jumping Frog of
Calaveras County”
2 masterpieces: Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1876
Realist, Regionalist, Humorist:
Realists: aimed at being true to common life
(A Romantic novelist uses romance to reveal truths that
would be hidden in a realistic story)
This means:
A new choice of subjects: far from idealized characters Attempt to represent faithfully environment and manners
of everyday life
Regionalism: emphasis on specific geographic
setting, making use of speech and manners of
the people of that region
Huck
is
one of the first major American novels
Twain as Humorist:
Humorist: Considered America’s greatest
humorist: ability to combine faith in
American dream with satire that pointed
out weaknesses in society
Used humor to critique what he saw as the
discrepancy between promise and reality in
America.
What is his “project”?
Novel is written in 1884
(post-Reconstruction) but set in 1830s and
1840s (pre-Civil War).
KEEP ASKING
YOURSELF
Was Twain a racist?
Critique of the South’s view of African-Americans (as seen
in his Autobiography)
Married into abolitionist family
Wrote biting satires criticizing treatment of Chinese in San
Francisco
When Twain visited New Haven in 1885, met and
befriended Warren McGuinn, an African-American student struggling to stay in Yale despite grinding poverty.
Twain ended up paying the young man's entire expenses
at Yale, and McGuinn went on to become a respected
Had much to say about racial inequality in the U.S.
Dec. 24, 1885, letter to Francis Wayland: "I do not believe I would
very cheerfully help a white student who would ask a benevolence of a stranger, but I do not feel so about the other color. We have ground the manhood out of them & the shame is ours, not theirs, & we should pay for it.”
Further about race, he wrote, "Even if the Jews have not all been
Important to get:
Socratic Irony:
The supposed possessor of knowledge (in
this case the author) never answers
question, nor does he right-out explain
concepts. Instead, poses questions.
Feigned ignorance becomes a means to an
end.
Consider why Twain creates a narrator
who is too innocent and ignorant to
understand what’s wrong with his
Other ways to look at the novel:
Picaresque
:
adventure story involving an anti-hero or
picaro
who wanders around with no actual
destination in mind.
Key elements
:
anti-hero (underling with no place in society);
autobiographical, potentially endless (no
tight plot, could go on and on)
Bildungsroman
: growth to maturity.
Other Authors on
Huckleberry Finn
T. S. Eliot said:
"It is Huck who gives the book style. The River
gives the book its form. But for the River, the book
might be only a sequence of adventures with a
happy ending. A river, a very big and powerful
river, is the only natural force that can wholly
determine the course of human peregrination....
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1935) said:
"Huckleberry Finn took the first journey back. He was the first to look back at the republic from the perspective of the west. His eyes were the first eyes that ever looked at us objectively that were not eyes from overseas. There were mountains at the frontier but he wanted more than mountains to look at with his restive eyes--he wanted to find out about men and how they lived together. And
H. L. Mencken said:
"I believe that 'Huckleberry Finn' is one of the great
masterpieces of the world, that it is the full equal of 'Don Quixote' and 'Robinson Crusoe' ….I believe that it will be read by human beings of all ages, not as a solemn duty but for the honest love of it, and over and over again, long
after every book written in America between the years 1800 and 1860, with perhaps three exceptions, has
disappeared entirely save as a classroom fossil. I believe that Mark Twain had a clearer vision of life, that he came nearer to its elementals and was less deceived by its false appearances, than any other American who has ever