残酷的现实主义课件.ppt

Naturalism 残酷的现实主义 Naturalism is a new and harsher realism, appearing at the end of the 19th century. Inspired by Darwinism, which stressed the animality(动物性，动物本能) of man and evolution, the naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that their lives were controlled by heredity and the environment, that religious “truths” were illusory（幻觉的，错觉的）, and that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion（湮没） in death. Pessimism and determinism pervaded the works of naturalistic writers such as Jack London and Theodore Dreiser. Major features Humans are controlled by laws of heredity and environment. And since they are controlled, they lack freedom of their own will. Brutish impulses dictate human behavior. The term for this is pessimistic “determinism”. Determinism means that humans do not have free will to choose their own course. It is pessimistic because constantly humans are getting ground down like little ants. They have no choice. The force of nature will overcome any human desire to create greatness. The universe is cold, godless, indifferent and hostile to human desires. Life becomes a struggle for survival. Hence, the struggle of the individual to adapt to environment, the fight for the spouse and the Darwinian idea of the survival of the fittest become natural concerns of naturalist fiction and drama. Two of the naturalist’s recurrent concerns are: social systems that destroy and dehumanize, and individual experience of loss and failure. The literary naturalists have a major difference from the realists. The naturalists also describe real life, the way things really are. They do not escape into a world of imagination. But they dismiss the realists as far too “genteel”. The naturalists do not look at the average, but at the violent, sensational, sordid, unpleasant, and ugly aspects of life. Instead of going to a middle-class neighborhood and writing about middle-class life, the naturalists would go to th