“That Saves Them the Blessings of Civilization”

The classic Hollywood Western is generally taken to be the antithesis of avant-garde art, a popular genre unaffected by modernism. However, John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) provides an illustrative example of middlebrow American modernist cinema. Influenced by French literary naturalism and German expressionism, Ford’s Western obliquely engages with the ills of modern urban existence and the interrelated “crises of modernity” that characterized the interwar years, when the global viability of liberal democracy was cast into doubt. In Stagecoach, the problems of modernity are treated (diegetically), though not fully cured, by a transformative if dangerous journey into the American Wild West. By integrating the formal innovations of F. W. Murnau’s expressionist style with his own epic and monumental vision of the American west, Ford epitomized an underappreciated form of American vernacular modernism that emerged across the arts in the 1910s, flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, and survived into the post-WWII era.

The Unnatural in the Natural: Leopold Jessner and Paul Leni’s Early Weimar Film Backstairs

This chapter explores the influence of literary naturalism on German Expressionist cinema as reflected in Leni’s 1921 film Backstairs, co-directed with Leopold Jessner. As this chapter suggests, Backstairs is a continuation of the styles of literary naturalism, a tendency frequently taken up in German cinema of the 1920s. Although specific visual elements of the film demonstrate an expressionistic impulse, other aspects including milieu and story are clearly leftovers of the literary naturalism of the pre-war period. Using Backstairs as a case in point, this contribution counters the overemphasised focus on expressionism in Weimar-era films by highlighting the multivalent styles present throughout this period. Taking into consideration the film’s set, story, acting, and direction, this chapter provides a close examination of a film often overlooked among the classics of Weimar cinema.

Breaking the Circle

First appearing in 1892 as a serialized novel, Han Bangqing's Haishanghua liezhuan 海上花列傳 (The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai) demonstrates the problematic of an “atypical” novel and the challenges it poses to the notion of the Chinese literary “modern.” This article examines Haishanghua's departure from the traditional circular narrative in terms of its narrative perspective, narrative time, and narrative structure and further notes that this circle-breaking pattern on the technical levels is repeated on the more profound semantic/thematic level of the novel as well. By exploring the sociohistorical context that gives rise to such modern narratives, this article draws links between Han's pioneering experimentations with Haishanghua and the rise of literary naturalism in the West. In this way, the author sheds light on the significance of this atypical novel in the periodization of the Chinese literary modern.

The Occasions of Theodore Dreiser’s Literary Criticism – a View from the Theodore Dreiser Edition

Theodore Dreiser published over fifty items of literary criticism between 1900 and 1945 on a wide variety of subjects, while additional discussion of literary matters is scattered through his correspondence, memoirs, unpublished speeches, and cultural and philosophical essays. Hitherto this work has proved useful piecemeal, in its illumination of Dreiser’s fiction, while a few outstanding pieces have served to define Dreiser’s version of realism or literary naturalism. This essay takes the literary criticism seriously as a body of work in itself, sketching out some categories and topics, and providing detailed historical contexts for several items, which reveal under-appreciated nuances and engagements in even better-known pieces such as “True Art speaks Plainly” and “Life, Art and America.” The essay sees coherence across the diverse foci of Dreiser’s literary criticism via the concept of the “occasions of literary criticism,” by which is meant the historical and cultural contexts into which he was writing. It charts the roots of Dreiser’s literary criticism in his need to respond to charges of “literary immorality,” its growth through his very particular response to censorship, and its maturity in his suggestion, in a speech given as part of the peace conference in Paris in 1938, of an American literary tradition dedicated to social justice, taking in Mark Twain and H. D. Thoreau as well as the expected cohort of realists and naturalists. The essay concludes by relating these contexts and preoccupations to the history and practice of the Theodore Dreiser Edition.

The Study of American Literary Naturalism: A Personal Retrospective

Donald Pizer’s personal retrospective also embraces history of American literary naturalism studies from the early1950s up to nowadays. From his earliest seminar in American literature D. Pizer was deeply drawn to the writers of the 1890s. As a student he was assured by the standard historical and critical studies of the period that naturalists had failed in this effort to apply a scientific accuracy and detachment to fictional representation, their novels were therefore both untrue and inept and naturalism was in effect a regrettable false step in the "development" of American literature. Since the 1960s being engaged in close study of the early naturalists — Norris, Crane, Garland, Dreiser — Pizer had to confront these conventional attitudes. When looked at closely as a fictional representation of beliefs about human nature and experience, the naturalistic novel appeared to be far more complex than it was believed to be. Pizer sought in a series of books and essays to describe and thus to redefine American naturalism as a whole. Rather than a mindless adoption and crude dramatization of deterministic formulas, he found in naturalistic fiction the conflict between old values and new experience, which usually resulted in a vital thematic ambivalence. It was this very ambivalence, rather than the certainties of the convinced determinist, which was the source of the fictional strength of the naturalistic novel of the period. There has been much recent interest in the American naturalist movement and its texts. It seems, as long as American writers respond deeply to the disparity between the ideal and the actual in our national experience, naturalism will remain one of the major means for the registering of this shock of discovery.

The Stock Ticker in the Garden: Frank Norris, American Literary Naturalism, and Capitalocene Aesthetics

This essay argues that American literary naturalism engages with the Anthropocene at the moment it began to be visible, the turn of the twentieth century, and specifically identifies the role of finance in precipitating the crisis. Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901) and The Pit (1903) offer a case study of a naturalist Capitalocene aesthetics, one capable of capturing global capitalism’s destructive planetary agency. As a student at the University of California at Berkeley, Frank Norris was exposed to Joseph LeConte’s influential theory of the Psychozoic era, a proto-Anthropocene theory from 1877 that named a new unit of geologic time in light of humanity’s status as a transformative planetary force. Norris adapted this theory into a critique of a rapidly globalizing capitalism’s effects on the planet and the natural world, particularly the structures of agricultural capitalism in which complex financial transactions led to destructive wheat monocultures. This critique anticipated the Capitalocene, a contemporary offshoot of the Anthropocene theory arguing that capitalism (rather than humanity per se) is responsible for the present planetary crisis. The vehicle of Norris’s critique is his multimedia landscape descriptions, which invoke and subvert Romantic landscape aesthetics through painterly language and visual paradox. At the center of this aesthetics is a contradiction in individual and collective agency that is also central to life and art in the Capitalocene: confronted with an anthropogenic landscape that is both destroyed and made sublime by the structures of capitalism, individual viewers both feel powerless in the face of the force it represents and feel themselves implicated in its creation, despite different levels of responsibility.

Annie Proulx

The philosophical underpinnings and existential implications of Annie Proulx’s fiction situate it in the tradition of literary naturalism. The writer portrays characters from the lower social classes, people who are unable to overcome the impasse in which they have found themselves. Far from idyllic sentiments, Proulx’s approach to the experience of place connects her to the writers associated with so-called new regionalism. She shows the degrading influence of the life amidst beautiful natural surroundings on individual human psyche. Proulx looks closely at the processes of the commodification of regional culture and interprets them as symptoms of a dangerous global tendency.