Back to the Grind

So this week I’m back to reading up for PhD exams. Shooting for sometime in August, if I can pull it off.

First I tackled Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. Some excellent essays there. He asserts that America has one great intellectual tradition—liberalism. In his collection of essays on literary criticism, he says criticism calls liberalism to higher standards. He feels literature has unique relevance because it is the human activity that gives the most precise account of complexity, variety, and difficulty.

From Trilling I moved on to Malcolm Bradbury in The Modern American Novel. Bradbury uses “Modern” not as a synonym for “contemporary,” but to label the literary era that followed Romanticism. The Modern novel was full of literary Naturalism and Realism. Now, when we think of naturalists, we think of nature people, right? But Naturalism in lit (an extension of Realism) means more like “harsh reality.” It followed Romanticism, which was not about human romances, but about imagination, openness to supernatural events, and even nature. Usually with happy endings. Think Jane Austin or James Fennimore Cooper.

In contrast, writers in the Naturalist tradition did not include the supernatural, and they showed how characters were controlled by outside forces, which overpowered them—so... Fate = The character's environment + Chance + Heredity. Think Stephen Crane and Jack London.

So why, I ask, can't lit people come up with labels for their eras that use primary meanings for words?

Anyway, Naturalist and Realist authors were Jack London writing about dogs being beat up by wicked masters. And Theodore Dreiser writing about Sister Carrie’s corruption in the big city. And Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage or that girl of the streets, Maggie, also ultimately corrupted. And I can’t leave out Frank Norris’s McTeague, though I'd like to forget I ever read it. No more novels about dentists! Anyway, they provided the lit world’s first real foray into brutality and explicit detail, “telling it like it is.” Often in urban settings. And usually with unhappy endings.

Following Bradbury, I read Donald Pizer’s Realism and Naturalism in 19th Century American Literature: "The modern student of literature was similar to the modern scientist. Both sought truthful description of the phenomenon under study." And now I’m wrapping up The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, by Leo Marx.

Marx, a professor of American cultural history at MIT, focused his work over many decades on the relationship between technology and 19th- and 20th-century US culture. His 1964 now-classic release, The Machine in the Garden, examines the difference between two ideals in the 1800s—the “pastoral” and the “progressive.” He uses pastoral not in its religious sense, but in its rural one. And he explores the 1800s because the ideas popular back then led us to where we are today.

Drawing on such writers as Virgil, Shakespeare (The Tempest), Irving (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow), Jefferson (Notes on Virginia), Thoreau (Walden), Melville (Moby-Dick), Hawthorne (Ethan Brand), and Fitzgerald (Great Gatsby), he shows the history of ideas and ideals, establishing that we have always loved the garden and idealized farm living, as these represent the middle space between wilderness and industrialized world.

So...does that mean there's some long-established literary tradition behind why I wish I were reading these books in a much greener, view-filled setting than in 103-degree Dallas, Texas?