A little addition to the previous information)))))
As Guy de
Maupassant is the representative of the movement of Naturalism and Realism,
here some information about them.
Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to
1940s that used detailed realism to
suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force
in shaping human character. It was depicted as a literary movement that seeks to
replicate a believable everyday reality,
as opposed to such movements as Romanticism
or Surrealism, in which
subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic, or even supernatural
treatment. Naturalism is the outgrowth of literary
realism, a prominent literary movement in mid-19th-century France and elsewhere.
Naturalistic writers were influenced by Charles
Darwin’s theory of evolution. They believed that one's heredity and social environment largely
determine one's character. Whereas realism seeks only to describe subjects as
they really are, naturalism also attempts to determine
"scientifically" the underlying forces (e.g., the environment or
heredity) influencing the actions of its subjects. Naturalistic works often
include uncouth or sordid subject matter; for example, Emile Zola’s works had frankness about sexuality along with a pervasive
pessimism. Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshness of life, including
poverty, racism, violence,
prejudice, disease, corruption, prostitution,
and filth. As a result, naturalistic writers were frequently criticized for
focusing too much on human vice and
misery.
Defining characteristics
There are defining characteristics of
literary naturalism. One of these is pessimism. Very often, one or more
characters will continue to repeat one line or phrase that tends to have a
pessimistic connotation, sometimes emphasizing the inevitability of death.
For example Bernard Bonnejean quotes this
passage of Huysmans where the symbolism of death is visible, such an allegory, in a portrait of an old woman:
[...] une
vieille bique de cinquante ans, une longue efflanquée qui bêlait à la lune,
campée sur ses maigres tibias [...] crevant les draps de ses os en pointe.
[...] an old
hag of fifty years, lonely and outstretched, bleating at the moon, poised on
her skinny shins [...] smashing the skin of her bones to a point (transl.
Joiner).
Another characteristic of literary
naturalism is detachment from the story. The author often tries to maintain a
tone that will be experienced as "objective". Also, an author will
sometimes achieve detachment by creating nameless characters (though, strictly
speaking, this is more common among modernists such as Ernest
Hemingway). This puts the focus on the plot and what happens to the character,
rather than the characters themselves.
Another characteristic of naturalism
is determinism, the opposite of free will, essentially. For determinism,
the idea that individual characters have a direct influence on the course of
their lives is supplanted by a focus on nature or fate. Often, a naturalist
author will lead the reader to believe a character's fate has been
predetermined, usually by environmental factors, and that he/she can do nothing
about it.
Another common characteristic is
a surprising twist at the end of the story. Equally, there tends to be in naturalist
novels and stories a strong sense that nature is indifferent to human struggle.
These are, however, only a few of the defining characteristics of naturalism.
Naturalism is an extension of
realism, and may be better understood by study of the basic precepts of that
literary movement. The term naturalism itself may have been used in
this sense for the first time by Émile Zola. It is believed that he sought a
new idea to convince the reading public of something new and more modern in his
fiction. He argued that his innovation in fiction-writing was the creation of
characters and plots based on the scientific
method.
Realism in the arts may be generally defined
as the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully without artificiality and
avoiding artistic conventions, implausible, exotic and supernatural elements.
In its
most specific sense, Realism was an artistic movement that began in France in the 1850s, after the 1848 Revolution. Realists rejected Romanticism, which had dominated
French literature and art since the late 18th century. Realism revolted against
the exotic subject matter and exaggerated emotionalism and drama of the
Romantic Movement. Instead it sought to portray real and typical contemporary
people and situations with truth and accuracy, and not avoiding unpleasant or
sordid aspects of life. Realist works depicted people of all classes in
situations that arise in ordinary life, and often reflected the changes wrought
by the Industrial and Commercial
Revolutions. The popularity of such 'realistic' works grew with the
introduction of photography —
a new visual source that created a desire for people to produce representations
which look “objectively real.”
More
generally, realist works of art are those that, in revealing a truth, may
emphasize the ugly or sordid, such as works of social realism, regionalism, or Kitchen sink
realism. The movement even managed to impact on opera, where it is called Verismo, with contemporary
working-class heroines such as Carmen,
who works in a cigarette factory, and Mimi in La
boheme.
Literature
Broadly defined as "the faithful
representation of reality", Realism as a movement in literature was
based on "objective reality", and focused on showing everyday,
quotidian activities and life, primarily among the middle or lower class
society, without romantic idealization or dramatization. It may be
regarded as the general attempt to depict subjects as they are considered to
exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or
interpretation and "in accordance with secular, empirical rules." As
such, the approach inherently implies a belief that such reality is ontologically independent of man's conceptual schemes,
linguistic practices and beliefs, and thus can be known (or knowable) to the
artist, who can in turn represent this 'reality' faithfully. As Ian Watt states,
modern realism "begins from the position that truth can be discovered by
the individual through the senses" and as such "it has its origins
in Descartes and Locke, and received its first full formulation by Thomas Reid in the
middle of the eighteenth century."
While the preceding Romantic era
was also a reaction against the values of the Industrial Revolution,
realism was in its turn a reaction to romanticism, and for this reason it is
also commonly derogatorily referred as "traditional" "bourgeois
realism". Some writers of Victorian literature produced works of
realism. The rigidities, conventions, and other limitations of "bourgeois
realism," prompted in their turn the revolt later labeled as modernism;
starting around 1900, the driving motive of modernist literature was the
criticism of the 19th-century bourgeois social order and world view, which was
countered with an antirationalist, antirealist and antibourgeois program.
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