Because Friday evenings usually pass me by, and then I'm left Saturday morning with a 7 AM realization, I wanted to post early this week (also, to avoid drawing parallels with tonight's episode of LOST).
As a biology and Spanish double-major, I often find myself unable to reconcile the two. I fell out of love with biology a while back, and my passion for Spanish is still growing. Biology has been a long road, and Spanish seems like its ending much too quickly... such is the life of a last-year college student.
The fact that the realists used the scientific method to approach literature is so bizarre to me. Of course, we can view our lives as experiments with multiple variables; you have parents A, hometown B... job Y, retirement plan Z, etc., but reducing the human experience to something like that (albeit in self-constructed circumstances) sort of takes out the "self" in the equation. What we discussed in class seems to suggest that two people, if placed within the same circumstances, would result in the exact same experience, story, and life. We, of course, know this to be false.
A better approach to the model of "realism" (rather than an "equation" example) might be to look at it in terms of expectations. Nothing about realism is fantastical or incredibly out-of-reach. After reading a realist work, I get the feeling of shrugging my shoulders and muttering, "yeah, that's about right." The circumstances of person X and person Y can be exactly the same, but the details of their lives would be different. Neither of them, however, would learn to fly or become a millionaire overnight.
I wonder how people reacted to realist works when they were written, especially those within the social classes that the works were written about. Were they depressing or eye-opening? Perhaps I should read a realist novel about a college student that doesn't know what to do with their life to find out.
Although I'm pretty sure I'd find it depressing.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Realism was controversial, as was Naturalism. One aspect that made contemporary critics uncomfortable, was the characters. Realist and naturalist novels took low-born characters (a prostitute/mistress, a beggar, a cigarette maker, the wife of an office worker, a ragpicker, etc.) and explored their lives and psychological workings in such a way as to connect them with the full panorama of social and political change that was occurring at the time. It was a way of elevating, so to speak, people and things that nobody had ever thought were worthy of being elevated or rendered important; and was also a way of bringing to the fore social problems that readers otherwise might never have thought about or paid attention to. When we look back on it now, it seems sort of tame stuff. But if you were living 125 years ago, it was explosive!
Post a Comment