LES 1 Introduction: Realism

painting Gustave Courbet

- Stonebreakers, 1850
- influential realist painting
- shows daily life
- made term realism popular
→ writers saw this too & ‘translated’
it into language (George Elliot)

1st half 19th cen: music & poetry

2nd half 19th cen: painting!

American realism is already a move toward modernism! diff from Br

- tried to do what Courbet did but in diff ways f.e. Charles Dickens
- long novels
❖ accumulation of detail
❖ serials (cliffhangers)
→ social reform: more people could read, printing, mandatory education in BR
→ unprecedented wealth:
BR became center of global power BUT also unprecedented poverty

⇒ desire to represent what was actually happening and no longer idealize!

Charles Dickens
- Realism is never one particular fixed thing, how realistic can representation be?
→ modernism: all about perspective, our experience of reality is different
- depiction of poor people, people who had nothing = slums?, could be vulgair
- does not idealize it

Huckleberry Finn
- young adult book not really children's literature
- why realist art could never be completely realistic, always some kind of ideology
- difficult language

realist art
- art of identification, recognizable
→ sympathy is still crucial
BUT not all authors go for this effect

modernists:
- sort of push you away from the story = alienation
- some realist already try to use this mechanism: Samuel Butler
last novel (reading list) realistically represented but alienated
difficult topics, f.e. artificial intelligence

social panorama: immerse yourself in society depicted in that novel

social satire: highlights something specific, sometimes through stereotypes (recognizable)
The Victorian Era

❖ British empire! (Canada, Australia, India)

❖ industrialization, massive wealth & poverty
❖ age of transition: nothing like those romantic poems, shift from country to city
❖ England becomes completely urbanized, from landowners to captains of industry
❖ accelerated rate of change
→ ways of living lives changes, number of life altering inventions
→ radically diff from 18th cen but also between 1st half & 2nd half
→ trains! many novels abt trains, steam
→ also time they started using fossil fuels
→ but unregulated, unevenly distributed (slums, child labor)
→ impactful science f.e. geology
❖ Britain becomes the worlds ‘banker’
→ migration
→ colonialism c.f. “Scramble for Africa”
❖ utilitarianism dominant philosophy
→ Adam Smith: economy will self organize as if driven by an invisible hand,
laissez-faire economy
❖ science and reason
→ geography, old earth
→ Higher Criticism = going back to scripture/bible to look at true values
reading bible no longer as truth but allegorical
→ George Eliot's translation of Das Leben Jesu, biography of Jesus

Charles Darwin
- isn't this spirituality enough?
→ everything living and growing have evolved from the same simple beginning
→ endlessly beautiful and complicated
- we are the result of a vast trial and error problem! life fits within its own niche
- very spiritual view

U.S. Civil War

❖ ‘Gilded Age’
- thin layer of gold over a very harsh reality
→ term Mark Twain
❖ slavery
- Emancipation Proclamation (1863)
❖ period of massive disruption
❖ “reconstruction” in the South, corruption in the North
❖ regionalism (Mark Twain)
❖ psychological realism (Henry James)
❖ perhaps more objective form of Realism? (to acknowledge we experience it different)

The Realist Era

❖ break with romanticism
- beauty in literature
 - literature as part of well rounded education
- “ and the market: new serialization
- subjectvity vs objectivity
- novel becomes literary form

LES 22/03/2022

evolution is a blind watchmaker!

⇒creationist argument: nature could not make smt as complicated as a watch SO someone
must have made it
⇒ by analogy: how complicated the human body is, somebody had to design it

→ (Darwin argued: evolution is the blind watchmaker

Erewhon and Empire

narrator pays attention to the way that they look: very beautiful, elegant, sophisticated
→ “they look like us” BUT slightly different

72) he’s so impressed, wants to make them impressed as well

74) very much like Europe bc they’ve banned all machines
→ concludes that they’re from the 10 lost tribes of Israel
bc of Strauss: interest in this, “Das Leben Jesus” from George Elliot
75) wants to convert him bc he wants to make money, glory
→ poking fun at that colonial mindset, reason why narrator wrote the book was to
colonize & start a fundraiser “for the better of the ppl of Erewhon”
→ happened a lot in 19th century

39) says he wants to raise money for expedition and can only do so by getting the interest of
the reader
255-6) conversion of Erewhon, says it shouldn’t be made known that they are the lost tribes
bc others would steal his money
257) “saving souls and filling pockets at one and the same time”

clearly have satire when talking about Erewhonians

BUT stereotypes of Chowbok?

260) please send me your money quickly bc “there is a complication”

⇒obviously satire: all about money! use value!
⇒ makes fun of utilitarianism in his own way

Samuel Butler (1835-1902)

● a “Mid-Victorian Modern” → lot of satire

● clergyman’s son BUT rejected Christianity
● traveled to New Zealand
● essay “Darwin Among the Machines” → develops ideas in “the Book of the Machine”
● unconventional BUT influential
realism

39) narrator draws us into the story, i have chosen wisely what I wrote here
101) I have tried to do it as nuanced as possible, within the limits of my own mind
79) it was the same as in Europe
→ names are common British names reversed

Erewhon similar to Gulliver's Travels, Utopia

● the good place (eutopos)
● the place from nowhere (outopos)

illness is a crime
→ self interest is what matters

in Erewhon: accusing someone of a crime he hasn’t committed is also a crime

→ Kafka & Brecht: alienation

29) preface: Butler speaking

→ when i’m satirizing i'm obviously not going to tell you i’m ironizing
→ admiration for Darwin’s theory

conclusion to Origin of Species

● very literary piece of science
● theory is never been falsified & same ideas come back in Victorian literature
→ Middlemarch: one variation of the same idea: Dorothea Brook
we’re all like her, within that variation we’re all different, those limits
are much wider than you would think f.e. plants, animals, all evolved
from single cell life forms
⇒ takes that from Darwin
→ Butler does the same in another way: gives us a plot that’s constructed
around evolution
NOT survival of the strongest
→ but the fittest: the fact that all things are alive means that we’re fit to live in our ecosystems

214) literally about evolution

Butler’s preface

the watch!
81) reference to bishop Paley: a watch is not a natural thing, has to be a watchmaker
→ look at the inside of a watch & thus the inside of our bodies
→ must have been designed!
97) machines are viewed as dangerous in Erewhon

warned about danger of machines