Is Naturalism Dead? Theodore Dreiser and the Problem of the Social

Description

If the term literary naturalism continues to have some critical efficacy (and since the 1908s many of the most insightful discussions of naturalist writers have done without it) it may be precisely because of its continued and even increasing ability to provoke uncertainty over its exact nature: whether it is to be understood as mode, genre, or ideological project; as an intensified version of realism or a reinvention of the romance; as a turn of the century literary practice interstitial between Victorian realism and modernism, or as a recurring ‘tendency’ to question the ideological apparatus of possessive individualism. This paper sets out an understanding of naturalism that explores its potential for both determinacy and indeterminacy, but refuses to fetishise that potential. Rather, it argues, American naturalist fiction is characterised by an enquiry into the scope of the ‘social’.
It takes as its main example Theodore Dreiser, the most symptomatically inconsistent writer in the original naturalist canon, one who defined literature as ‘a true picture of life, honestly and reverentially set down’ yet who would also reflect that ‘I seem, to my self-analyzing eyes, somewhat more of a romanticist than a realist’.
The core of the paper is a re-reading of one of the touchstones of literary naturalism, the passage in Dreiser’s 1912 novel The Financier, set in antebellum Philadelphia, in which protagonist Frank Cowperwood learns ‘how life is organized’ by watching a long fight to the death between a lobster and a squid which have been put on a display in a tank. Often cited as primary evidence for naturalism’s reductive social Darwinism, the passage instead, as I will show, carefully delineates a series of frameworks of causation and agency, in which the historical institution of chattel slavery, and political challenges to it, are prominent. I will go on to position this ‘naturalism’ alongside the range of discourses employed within The Financier (whose ‘epic’ and encyclopaedic form is now being appreciated in the wake of Roark Mulligan’s 2010 critical edition), to try to gain traction on questions of the scope of the ‘social’ as a category more or less distinct from history, nature, and politics.

Period	27 Oct 2018
Held at	University of Leicester, United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	National