Chapter 30 Industry, Empire, and the Realist Style.

Chapter 30Industry, Empire,

and the Realist Style

Romanticism

Romantics were concerned with the inner life—with feelings, intuition, and imagination. They sought escape from the city into natural beauty, and they venerated the past, particularly the Middle Ages, which they viewed as noble, idyllic, and good in contrast to the spiritually impoverished present.

RealismRealists shifted attention away from individual human feelings to the external world, which they investigated with the meticulous care of the scientist. Preoccupied with reality as it actually is, realist writers and artists depicted ordinary people, including the poor and humble, in ordinary circumstances.

RealismWith a careful eye for detail and in a matter-of-fact way devoid of romantic exuberance and exaggeration, realists described peasants, factory workers, laundresses, beggars, criminals, and prostitutes.

Vissarion Belisky

On realistic poetry: “We demand not the ideal of life, but life as it is. Be it good or bad, we do not wish to adorn it, for we think that in poetic presentation it is equally beautiful in both cases precisely because it is true and that where there is truth, there is poetry . . . .”

NaturalismRealism quickly evolved into naturalism.

Naturalist writers held that human behavior was determined by the social environment. They argued that certain social and economic conditions produced predicable traits in men and women and that cause and effect operated in society as well as in physical nature.

Perry, Peden and Von Laue. Sources of the Western Tradition. 161-62.

Émile Zola

“And this is what constitutes the experimental novel: to possess a knowledge of the mechanism of the phenomena inherent in man, to show the machinery of his intellectual and sensory manifestations, under the influences of heredity and environment . . . .”

Honore Daumier

1808-79

Honoré Daumier, Third Class Carriage, 1862

Honoré Daumier, The Uprising, 1848

Honoré Daumier, The Hauler of a Boat, 1856-60

"The Army Hierarchy"

Daumier, "The Army Hierarchy“, 1854

Industrial Revolution

Child labor

http://www.umbc.edu/history/CHE/techerpages/KDavies/Industrial_Revolution.html

Man and Machine

Thames ironworks, late 19th century: workers and foreman http://www.susqu.edu/history/faculty/imhoof/industrialrevolutionimages/default.htm

Foundry, http://asweb.artsci.uc.edu/german/172/foundry.jpg

“Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack that is required of him . . . ”

(Communist Manifesto, Fiero 757)

Man and Environment

English Milltown, http://www.historywiz.com/galleries/milltown.htm

The Conservative Position

“We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.”

--Edmund Burke,

Reflections on the Revolution in France

The Liberal Position Governments should work to se

cure “the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.”

Jeremy Bentham

(who advocated utilitarianism)

The Liberal Position “The only freedom which deserves

the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it.”

--J. S. Mill, On Liberty

Communist Manifesto1848

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

Friedrich Engels (1820-1895)

“Bourgeois capitalism alienates workers from their own productive efforts and robs individuals of their basic humanity” (Fiero 756).

Communist Manifesto

“WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!”

(Fiero 575)

Ideology“Ideology or ‘the ruling ideas of the ruling class’ is a way of legitimating or justifying social and economic arrangements that might otherwise appear unjust because they are characterized by inequality” (Michael Ryan, Literary Theory, 53).

Ideology“In feudal times, ideology consisted of the belief that the ruling nobility were of a higher genetic order than mere laboring commoners, that subservient behavior in this life would be rewarded in the afterlife, and that there was a natural , theologically ordained order of rank which prescribed social roles” (Michael Ryan, Literary Theory, 53).

Ideology“In modern times, ideology consists of the belief that humans are free individuals rather than social beings, and as individuals they freely strive for success in an open economy. Those who succeed do so not because of initial class position determines where one ends up in life but because talent results in deserved success. Those who fail are not victims of systemic pressures that allocate rewards to the already well placed . . . (Michael Ryan, Literary Theory, 53).

Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Walter Benjamin

Loss of authenticity/originality

The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from tradition.

The End