Naturalism and the Human Animal

This class focuses on “naturalism” as a literary category and critical fiction in order to explore the relation between science, law, and literary form. Naturalism is often associated with a specific mode of French realism, taken up and amended to suit American interests in an era of complex social, economic, and political transformations at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. This approach takes naturalism as a historical category, a mode of writing associated with social Darwinism, the rejection of middle-class realism, and the embrace of fixed “laws” governing human conduct. Naturalists such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser have been understood to resist particular ideologies of American realism and embrace modes of representation targeting the working poor and subaltern classes as exemplary subjects of social meaning. But subsequent critical approaches to these modes of representation have challenged the binary of realism and naturalism, gleaning complex relations between machine and animal, production and reproduction, object and subject across the fictions of this period.

This class will use the rubric of “naturalism” to inquire into emerging representations of the human-as-animal in this period, touching on debates about nationalism, imperialism, and nature that transect journalist, legal, and literary writings, as well as debates about the human animal that carry us forward well into the twentieth century. While our primary readings will focus on the late 19th/early 20th century, our discussions will open up questions of methodology useful to students of modern and contemporary literature. Critics treated in this class raise questions about how to read political economy in relation to literary form, the way in which markets and machines are treated in new modes of print capitalism, and the radical resignification of race and gender in the shift from status to contract. Our reading will include a range of critics, as well as literary texts from the following list of authors: Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, William Dean Howells, Frank Norris, Jack London, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, David Graham Phillips, Abraham Cahan, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer, John Dos Passos, Nella Larsen, and Djuna Barnes.