Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Naturalism
Naturalism has plagued our class these last two weeks, and has managed to turn our brains inside out and upside down in an effort to comprehend such an abstract topic. Although I have yet to present anything to the class, everything I have looked up for Naturalism has made my understanding of the topic less and less clear in comparison to my previous "comprehension". I do not like to say that anyone in our class, besides you of course, has a clear understanding of Naturalism because it seems that the more we learn our previously bullet proof ideologies are instantly questioned and torn apart. It seems that Naturalism is not only a branch of Realism, but a concept that has been around since the Greek times, who in science and in mostly in their mythology have very similar styles like the Naturalism we are looking at. Right now my understanding, if you must say, is very varied, and needs to worked on because it seems that almost every day it changes when introduced to new ideas and new information.
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I hope that the presentations have helped. At its heart, naturalism is a way of thinking that revolves around the idea that natural laws are at the base of everything -- including human behavior. Zola was the extreme that we have seen in class; he felt that we placed characters into naturalist stories and explored their behavior as one might when placing a rat into a maze and doing things like shock it or force it through water hazards. Humans placed into works of literature would behave in ways that might be known through natural laws. Obviously, there are holes in the theory. Different writers thought about it in different ways, but at base, they looked for those natural laws and their influence on human behavior. To those at the heart of this movement, those behaviors would be predictable through an understanding of cause and effect of the laws of the universe. Free will might be an illusion.
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