American Literary Naturalism in Black and White

3 Credits.

In this course we will explore one of the most vexed topics in the study of American literature: naturalism, a genre concerned with the biological and social forces that limit individual freedom. For years, critics and readers have debated whether naturalism presents a world in which humans are hopelessly trapped by forces beyond their control or one in which those forces can eventually be controlled and society improved. Is naturalism skeptical, even derisive toward, the idea of progress, or is it a toolkit that enables writers to act as progressive scientist-reformers? In the US context, many naturalist novels have been immediate best-sellers—Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Richard Wright’s Native Son—but their reputations have tended to diminish over time, as naturalism became increasingly associated with despair, poor prose style, and scientific racism. Yet one of the central suppositions of this course is that this reputation has a lot to do with who has been considered naturalist, i.e., a fairly exclusive cohort of white American male writers. From the late 1890s to the 1940s, African American writers drew on naturalism to contest the very social order that the worst aspects of the genre propped up. This course offers a rare opportunity to read these black naturalists alongside white American male and female naturalist authors in an effort to develop a more nuanced account of the genre than the reduction of it to pessimism or Social Darwinism. The class might appeal to those interested in the relationship between scientific understandings of the body and literature; minority authors and mainstream tradition; literature and urbanization. Or those who simply prefer their art, coffee, romance, etc. a little bitter.