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Abstract: In December 1942, American movie audiences saw a startling title card introducing what they thought would be a low budget “B” picture from RKO studios: “‘Even as fog continues to lie in the valleys, so does ancient sin cling to the low places, the depressions in the world consciousness.’ The Anatomy of Atavism— Dr. Louis Judd” (Cat People). Off-brand for a studio known for its glossy Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, the epigraph, set against a backdrop of a knight holding aloft a cat pierced by his sword, references respectively a fictitious quotation, book, and author (see figure 1). With its naturalistic echoes of “ancient sin” and “atavism,” it might have been borrowed from Frank Norris’s McTeague, whose ... Read More PubDate: 2023-06-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: My point of departure for this discussion is two questions posed by Gregory Phipps: first, “in what ways are current developments in digital technology and televisual culture recasting the production of naturalist narratives'” and second, “[w]hich films, television shows, and computer games also display naturalist influences'” (viii). Naturalist critics have offered compelling answers to these questions. Klaus Schmidt has provided a veritable cornucopia of films that engage with various naturalist themes, and he calls upon “scholars willing to engage in detective or translation work in order to identify neonaturalist strategies” within this genre (39). Alan Gibbs takes up that call and, in his analysis of ... Read More PubDate: 2023-06-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The 2021 film, The Tragedy of Macbeth, marks Joel Coen’s first solo project after several decades of collaboration with his brother Ethan. A striking adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, the film is also a potent engagement with themes and forms pertinent to naturalism. Such an interpretation derives both from the originating play—which engages at a complex level with notions of fate and fatalism—and from Coen’s characteristic preoccupation with determinism, a perennially important component of naturalism. This article begins with a brief survey of the Coen brothers’ oeuvre, emphasizing in particular their numerous earlier engagements with naturalistic themes and forms. Two sections then return to the source material ... Read More PubDate: 2023-06-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The postwar era in the mid-twentieth century initiated a transformation in world culture that is hard to overestimate. These changes accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s and seemed to touch every aspect of our personal and social lives. In this context the naturalist worldview in all its tense polyvalence not only retained relevance but became central to our public expression. Of course, cinema and television had developed in the previous decades as the major artistic mode that articulated a collective cultural consciousness and an acute anxiety. This twentieth-century form, especially in America, emerged from a myth-making apparatus that absorbed and articulated our sense of national values and the conflicts that ... Read More PubDate: 2023-06-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: This article examines the naturalist visual aesthetic of contemporary television crime series, focusing on HBO’s True Detective season one (2014) and also briefly discussing season three (2019), Netflix’s Bloodline (2015–2017), and Ozark (2017–2022). The series’ visual aesthetics and portrayal of time create a markedly naturalistic television subgenre. Klaus H. Schmidt identifies “substantial configurations of neonaturalism in recent U.S. film” and television from 1996 to 2019 (18), and the series discussed here contribute to this resurgence. Indeed, Schmidt, who observes that more work is needed to fully flesh out the parameters of neonaturalism (18)—which is several removes from classic naturalism by way of its ... Read More PubDate: 2023-06-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The twenty-first century has broadly witnessed a resurgence of American literary naturalism in contemporary American literature and culture. This is evident from the fiction of authors including Cormac McCarthy, Daniel Woodrell, and Lionel Shriver, as well as in films and TV series such as Wind River (2017) and True Detective (Season 1, 2014). Much work remains to be done on exploring and accounting for this resurgence as a whole.1 One important cultural area that remains almost completely untouched, however, is video games. In the earlier years of game studies, critics expressed a skepticism regarding the extent to which video games should be read via the analytical tools of other disciplines (see Aarseth). ... Read More PubDate: 2023-06-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: With this issue, I am retiring as editor of Studies in American Naturalism. For twenty-six years I served as coeditor with Stephen Brennan of the journal’s predecessor, Dreiser Studies, and then as coeditor and then editor of its successor, SAN. I’ve been privileged to work with a group of engaging and talented contributors, many of whom have emerged as leaders in their field. I thank them for making this journal possible, as I thank the many readers whose advice improved essays. I am also grateful to the Editorial Board for counsel along the way and to the journals staff at the University of Nebraska Press, who have been a joy to work with and who have made it possible to reach readers around the world.With the ... Read More PubDate: 2023-06-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: An adult and child travel slowly across a blasted American landscape, encountering various dangers. The most perilous places are built up areas, the country’s now desolate and ruined former cities, where paranoid and heavily-armed gangs hold sway. Food has become a scarce and fiercely guarded commodity, with few people willing to broker empathetic human interaction. In these desperate circumstances, formerly minor issues or objects—for example, infection or the availability of medicine or ammunition—assume major significance. The morality of the traveling pair is constantly called into doubt, with the child frequently and progressively losing faith in the ethical value of their guardian’s responses to their various ... Read More PubDate: 2023-06-16T00:00:00-05:00
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