revisaoav2 Literatura Norte-americana

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LITERATURA NORTE AMERICANA
Profª. Claudia de Freitas Lopes
Aula Revisão 6 a 10
LITERATURA NORTE AMERICANA
 REVIEW: Classes 6 to 10
REALISM AND NATURALISM
The 19th century was an era of rapidly accelerating scientific discovery and invention, with significant developments in the fields of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, electricity, and metallurgy that laid the groundwork for the technological advances of the 20th century. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain and spread around the world.
LITERATURA NORTE AMERICANA
 REVIEW: Classes 6 to 10
Advances in medicine and the understanding of human anatomy and disease prevention;
population doubled during the 19th century, from approximately 200 million to more than 400 million
The introduction of railroads
Slavery was greatly reduced around the world
LITERATURA NORTE AMERICANA
 REVIEW: Classes 6 to 10
The 19th century was remarkable in the widespread formation of new settlement foundations which were particularly prevalent across North America
The writing during this period was also very regional
realistic writers set their stories in specific American regions, rushing to capture the "local color" before it was lost.
American realists built their plots and characters around people's ordinary, everyday complexities of their human experiences
LITERATURA NORTE AMERICANA
 REVIEW: Classes 6 to 10
Emergence of American Realism 
The industrial revolution that took place at the end of the 19th century changed our country in remarkable ways. People left rural homes for opportunities in urban cities. With the development of new machinery and equipment, the U.S. economy became more focused on factory production; Americans did not have to chiefly rely on farming and agriculture to support their families. At the same time, immigrants from all over the world crowded into tenements to take advantage of new urban opportunities. In the end, the sweeping economic, social, and political changes that took place in post-war life allowed American Realism to prevail. 
LITERATURA NORTE AMERICANA
 REVIEW: Classes 6 to 10
Salient points about realism:
Plot and Character 
Character is more important than action and plot; complex ethical choices are often the subject. 
Characters appear in the real complexity of temperament and motive; they are in explicable relation to nature, to each other, to their social class, to their own past. 
Humans control their destinies; characters act on their environment rather than simply reacting to it. 
Renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail.  Selective presentation of reality with an emphasis on verisimilitude, even at the expense of a well-made plot. 
Events will usually be plausible.  Realistic novels avoid the sensational, dramatic elements of naturalistic novels and romances. 
LITERATURA NORTE AMERICANA
 REVIEW: Classes 6 to 10
Class is important; the novel has traditionally served the interests and aspirations of an insurgent middle class. 
Realism is viewed as a realization of democracy. 
The morality of Realism is intrinsic, integral, relativistic – relations between people and society are explored. 
Realists were pragmatic, relativistic, democratic and experimental.  The purpose of writing is to instruct and to entertain.
 
LITERATURA NORTE AMERICANA
 REVIEW: Classes 6 to 10
Naturalism in American Literature 
Type of literature that attempts to apply scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings. Unlike realism, which focuses on literary technique, naturalism implies a philosophical position: for naturalistic writers, since human beings are, in Emile Zola's phrase, "human beasts," characters can be studied through their relationships to their surroundings. Zola's 1880 description of this method in Le roman experimental (The Experimental Novel, 1880) follows Claude Bernard's medical model and the historian Hippolyte Taine's observation that "virtue and vice are products like vitriol and sugar"--that is, that human beings as "products" should be studied impartially, without moralizing about their natures. Other influences on American naturalists include Herbert Spencer and Joseph LeConte.
LITERATURA NORTE AMERICANA
 REVIEW: Classes 6 to 10
NATURALISM X REALISM
LITERATURA NORTE AMERICANA
 REVIEW: Classes 6 to 10
The naturalist thought that the realist had not treated all aspects of life and was determined to show everything connected with life. The naturalist also accused the realist of failing to depict things which are unpleasant, ugly, or sordid. Consequently, the naturalist often concentrates to a greater extent on those aspects of life which are of dubious value, and seldom does it depict the higher nature of humanity
LITERATURA NORTE AMERICANA
 REVIEW: Classes 6 to 10
HENRY JAMES
LITERATURA NORTE AMERICANA
 REVIEW: Classes 6 to 10
Henry James has been called the first of the great psychological realists in our time. Honored as one of the greatest artists of the novel, he is also regarded as one of America's most influential critics and literary theorists. During the fifty years of his literary career, which spanned the period from the end of the American Civil War to the beginning of World War I, James produced a body of tales and novels that fills thirty-six volumes and an almost equal number of volumes of non-fiction prose, including travel books, autobiography, books of criticism, letters, and literary notebooks.
LITERATURA NORTE AMERICANA
 REVIEW: Classes 6 to 10
He favored internal, psychological drama, and his work is often about conflicts between imaginative protagonists and their difficult environments. As his secretary Theodora Bosanquet remarked in her monograph Henry James at Work:
When he walked out of the refuge of his study and into the world and looked around him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of doomed, defenseless children of light…. His novels are a repeated exposure of this wickedness, a reiterated and passionate plea for the fullest freedom of development, unimperilled by reckless and barbarous stupidity
LITERATURA NORTE AMERICANA
 REVIEW: Classes 6 to 10
EDITH WHARTON 
LITERATURA NORTE AMERICANA
 REVIEW: Classes 6 to 10
Edith Wharton (1862-1937) portrayed a fascinating segment of the American experience. She was a born storyteller, whose novels are justly celebrated for their vivid settings, satiric wit, ironic style, and moral seriousness. Her characters, such as Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence, Ethan Fromme, and the charming but ineffectual Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, are some of the most memorable in American literature. Often portrayed as tragic victims of cruel social conventions, they are trapped in bad relationships or confining circumstances. Her own life stands as an example of the obstacles that a woman of her time and place had to overcome to find self-realization.
LITERATURA NORTE AMERICANA
 REVIEW: Classes 6 to 10