Naturalism is a movement in theatre, film, and literature that seeks to replicate a believable everyday reality, as opposed to such movements as Romanticism or Surrealism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic, or even supernatural treatment…
Influences
Naturalistic writers were influenced by the evolution theory of Charles Darwin.[1] They believed that one's heredity and social environment decide one's character. Whereas realism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, naturalism also attempts to determine "scientifically" the underlying forces (i.e. the environment or heredity) influencing these subjects' actions. They are both opposed to romanticism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic, or even supernatural treatment. Naturalistic works often include uncouth or sordid subject matter. For example, Émile Zola's works had a frankness about sexuality along with a pervasive pessimism. Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshness of life, including poverty, racism, sex, prejudice, disease, prostitution, filth, etc. They were often very pessimistic and frequently criticized for being too blunt.
[edit] Theatre
In theatre, Naturalism developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It refers to theatre that attempts to create a perfect illusion of reality through a range of dramatic and theatrical strategies: detailed, three-dimensional settings (which bring Darwinian understandings of the determining role of the environment into the staging of human drama); everyday speech forms (prose over poetry); a secular world-view (no ghosts, spirits or gods intervening in the human action); an exclusive focus on subjects that are contemporary and indigenous (no exotic, otherworldly or fantastic locales, nor historical or mythic time-periods); an extension of the social range of characters portrayed (away from the aristocrats of classical drama, towards bourgeois and eventually working-class protagonists); and a style of acting that attempts to recreate the impression of reality (often by seeking complete identification with the role, understood in terms of its 'given circumstances', which, again, transcribe Darwinian motifs into performance, as advocated by Stanislavski).[2]
[edit] The critique of Naturalism
Naturalism was criticized in the twentieth century by a whole host of theatre practitioners; Bertolt Brecht, for example, argued for a puncturing of the illusion of the surface of reality in order to reach the real forces that determine it beneath its appearance; in place of the absorption within a fiction that Naturalistic performance promotes in its audience, he attempted to inculcate a more detached consideration of the realities and the issues behind them that the play confronts. His approach is a development, however, of the critical project initiated by Naturalism; it is a form of modernist realism.[3]
Naturalistic performance is often unsuitable for the performance of other types of theatre—particularly older forms, but also many twentieth-century non-Naturalistic plays. Shakespearean verse, for example, demands a rigorous attention to its rhythmic sub-structure and often long and complex phrasings; naturalistic actors tend to cut these down to the far shorter speech patterns of modern drama, destroying the rhythmic support that assists the audience's process of comprehension. In addition, Shakespearean drama assumed a natural, direct and often-renewed contact with the audience on the part of the performer; 'fourth wall' performances foreclose these complex layerings of theatrical and dramatic realities that are built into Shakespeare's dramaturgy. A good example is the line spoken by Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra's act five, when she contemplates her humiliation in Rome at the hands of Octavius Caesar, by means of mocking theatrical renditions of her fate: "And I shall see some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness in the posture of a whore"; that this was to be spoken by a boy in a dress in a theatre is an integral part of its dramatic meaning—a complexity unavailable to a purely naturalistic treatment.[4]
[edit] Film
Non-comedic film is nearly always almost aggressively naturalistic in style, except in the case of science fiction such as Star Wars, fantasy (such as The Wizard of Oz), musicals, or plays written in verse. A film like Oz, for instance, uses heavily artificial settings in the color sequences. Musical films are often considered to be especially difficult to bring off because the audience is following the plot realistically, and suspension of disbelief is required when characters begin to sing and/or dance with an invisible orchestra accompanying them. Shakespeare was once considered unsuitable for sound films because of the author's use of blank verse rather than natural dialogue. It took the Shakespeare adaptations of Laurence Olivier, and later, Franco Zeffirelli, to win critics over.
[edit] Literature
As in film, naturalism is the general style, although the flexibility and amorphous quality of prose, as opposed to the concrete visual imagery of film, has allowed for a great number of other forms. In this context, naturalism is the outgrowth of Realism, a prominent literary movement in mid-19th-century France and elsewhere.
[edit] United States
In the United States, the genre is associated principally with writers such as Abraham Cahan, Ellen Glasgow, David Graham Phillips, Jack London, Edith Wharton, and most prominently Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser and Andrea Zorrilla . The term naturalism operates primarily in counter distinction to realism, particularly the mode of realism codified in the 1870s and 1880s, and associated with William Dean Howells and Henry James.
It is important to clarify the relationship between American literary naturalism, with which this entry is primarily concerned, from the genre also known as naturalism that flourished in France at the end of the 19th century. French naturalism, as exemplified by Emile Zola, can be regarded as a programmatic, well-defined and coherent theory of fiction that self-consciously rejected the notion of free will, and dedicated itself to the documentary and "scientific" exposition of human behavior as being determined by, as Zola put it, "nerves and blood".
Many of the American naturalists, especially Norris and London, were heavily influenced by Zola. They sought explanations for human behavior in natural science, and were skeptical, at least, of organized religion and beliefs in human freewill. However, the Americans did not form a coherent literary movement, and their occasional critical and theoretical reflections do not present a uniform philosophy. Although Zola was a touchstone of contemporary debates over genre, Dreiser, perhaps the most important of the naturalist writers, regarded Balzac as a greater influence. Naturalism in American literature is therefore best understood historically in the generational manner outlined in the first paragraph above. In philosophical and generic terms, American naturalism must be defined rather more loosely, as a reaction against the realist fiction of the 1870s and 1880s, whose scope was limited to middle-class or "local color" topics, with taboos on sexuality and violence. The most significant elements of this reaction can be summarized as follows.
Naturalist fiction in the United States often concentrated on the non-Anglo, ethnically marked inhabitants of the growing American cities, many of them immigrants and most belonging to a class-spectrum ranging from the destitute to the lower middle-class. The naturalists were not the first to concentrate on the industrialized American city, but they were significant in that they believed that the realist tools refined in the 1870s and 1880s were inadequate to represent it. Abraham Cahan, for example, sought both to represent and to address the Jewish community of New York's East Side, of which he was a member. The fiction of Theodore Dreiser, the son of first and second generation immigrants from Central Europe, features many German and Irish figures. Frank Norris and Stephen Crane, themselves from established middle-class Anglophone families also registered the ethnic mix of the metropolis, though for the most part via reductive stereotypes. In somewhat different ways, more marginal to the mainstream of naturalism, Ellen Glasgow's version of realism was specifically directed against the mythologizing of the South, while the series of "problem novels" by David Graham Phillips, epitomized by the prostitution novel Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917), can be regarded as naturalistic by virtue of their underclass subject-matter.
Allied to this, naturalist writers were skeptical towards, or downright hostile to, the notions of bourgeois individualism that characterized realist novels about middle-class life. Most naturalists demonstrated a concern with the animal or the irrational motivations for human behavior, sometimes manifested in connection with sexuality and violence. Here they differed strikingly from their French counterparts.
Realism (arts)
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Realism in the visual arts and literature is the depiction of subjects as they appear in everyday life, without embellishment or interpretation. The term is also used to describe works of art which, in revealing a truth, may emphasize the ugly or sordid.
Realism often refers to the artistic movement, which began in France in the 1850s. The popularity of realism grew with the introduction of photography - a new visual source that created a desire for people to produce things that look “objectively real”. Realists positioned themselves against romanticism, a genre dominating French literature and artwork in the late 18th and early 19th century. Undistorted by personal bias, Realism believed in the ideology of objective reality and revolted against exaggerated emotionalism. Truth and accuracy became the goals of many Realists.
Dramatic arts
The achievement of realism in theatre was to direct attention to the physical and philosophic problems of ordinary existence, both socially and psychologically. In plays of this mode people emerge as victims of forces larger than themselves, as individuals confronted with a rapidly accelerating world.[1] These pioneering playwrights were unafraid to present their characters as ordinary, impotent, and unable to arrive at answers to their predicaments.This type of art represents what we see with our human eyes,
Cinema
Italian neorealism was a cinematic movement incorporating elements of realism that developed in post-WWII Italy. Notable Neorealists included Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, and Roberto Rossellini.
Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan is a Central University in India and is located in the Indian state of West Bengal. It is one of the most well-known universities of the country and has been the alma mater of several prominent personalities of the nationalist movement in India. Tagore coined the name Visva Bharati, which means the communion of the world with India. In its initial years Tagore expressed his dissatisfaction with the word 'university', since university translates to Vishva-Vidyalaya, which is smaller in scope than Visva Bharati. Soon after independence, in 1951 the institution was given the status of an university, and renamed Visva Bharati University.
Contents
[hide]
1 History
2 Organisation
3 Famous alumni/academics/affiliates
4 See also
5 External links
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[edit] History
The origins of the university date back to 1863 when Maharshi Debendranath Tagore established an ashram (called Brahmacharya Ashram and later renamed Brahmacharya Vidyalaya) at the spot that has now come to be known as chatim tala at the heart of Santiniketan. It was established with a view to encourage people from all walks of life to come to the spot and meditate. In 1901 his youngest son Rabindranath Tagore established a co-educational school inside the premises of the ashram called Patha Bhavana. At this school, there were originally four founding students who stuided under road lamps with Tagore. One of these is ex CJI Sudhi Ranjan Das who went on to become the university's vice-chancellor later on in life.
Tagore used to also organise the Hindu Mela in Santiniketan, which became a centre of nationalist activity at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1921 Tagore started the university with proceeds from the prize money of the Nobel Prize he received for the publication of his book of poems entitled Gitanjali in 1913. The university also became a centre of Brahmo learning in this period. The institution was granted its full university status 1951. Rathindranath Tagore was appointed as the first upacharya of the university. Another member of the Tagore family who performed the role of upacharya was Indira Devi Chaudhurani.
Upacharyas
Rathindranath Tagore, 1951-1953
Kshitimohan Sen, 1953-1954
Probodhchandra Bagchi, 1954-1956
Indiradevi Chaudhurani, 1956-1956 (acting)
Satyendranath Bose, 1956-1958
Kshitishchandra Chaudhuri, 1958-1959 (acting)
Sudhi Ranjan Das, 1959-1965
Kalidas Bhattacharya, 1966-1970
Pratul Chandra Gupta, 1970-1975
Surajit Chandra Sinha, 1975-1980
Amlan Dutta, 1980-1984
Nemai Sadhan Bosu, 1984-1989
Ajit Kumar Chakrabarty, 1989-1990 (performed the duty of upacharya)
Ashin Dasgupta, 1990-1991
Sisir Mukhopadhyaya, 1991-1991 (performed the duty of upacharya)
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, 1991-1995
Sisir Mukhopadhyay, 1995-1995 (performed the duty of upacharya)
R.R.Rao, 1995-1995 (performed the duty of upacharya)
Dilip K.Sinha, 1995-2001
Sujit Basu, 2001-2006
Rajat Kanta Ray, 2006- present
[edit] Organisation
The high officials of the university include the paridarshaka (visitor), acharya (chancellor), and the upacharya (vice chancellor).
The university has several institutes and colleges under its supervision for undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral studies. They are Vidya Bhavana (Institute of Humanities), Shiksha Bhavana (Institute of Sciences), Palli-Shiksha Bhavana (Institute of Agricultural Sciences), Binay Bhavana (Institute of Education) and Kala Bhavana (Institute of Fine Arts). It has a museum under its aegis, which is called Rabindra Bhavana which is housed in the Uttarayan complex, the residence of Tagore.
It also has four schools under its supervision. They are Patha Bhavana, Shiksha Satra (two elementary and secondary schools) and Uttar Shiksha Sadana (a higher secondary school) also confer certificates of the university.
Apart form that It has associate institutes.Bengal Institute of technology and Management(BITM,Santiniketan),IIIT Kolkata are among them.