Theodore Dreir
1. Dreir’s life and position:
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Theodore Dreir is generally acknowledged as one of America's literary naturalists. He possd none of the usual aids to a writer’s career: no money, no friend in power, no formal education worthy of mention, no family tradition in letters. With every disadvantage piled upon him, Dreir, by his strong will and his dogged persistence, eventually burst out and became one of the important American writers.
2. His major works:
Sister Carrie 嘉丽妹妹年画娃娃图片--the best-known
Financier 金融家
字头歌The Titan 巨头
The Stoic 代签斯多噶
An American Tragedy 美国的悲剧
2017香港小姐3. Dreir's style:
Dreir's style has been a controversial aspect of his work from the beginning. For lack of concision, his writings appear more inclusive and less lective, and the readers are sometimes burdened with massive detailed descriptions of characters and events. Though the time quence is clear and the plot straight forward, he has been always accud of being awkward in ntence structure, inept and occasionally flatly wrong in word lection and meaning, and mixed and disorganized in voice and tone. For him language is a means of communication rather than an art form. However, Dreir's contribution to the American literary history cannot be ignored. He broke away from the genteel tradition of literature and dramatized the life in a very realistic way. There is no comment, no judgment but facts of life in the stories. His style is not polished but very rious and well calculated to achieve the thematic ends he sought
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4. An analysis of Sister Carrie:那一抹
Sister Carrie best embodies Dreir’s naturalistic belief that men are controlled and conditioned by heredity, environment and chance, but a few extraordinary and unsophisticated human beings refu to accept their fate wordlessly and instead strive, unsuccessfully, to find meaning and purpo for their existence. Carrie, as one of such, ns that she is merely a cipher in an uncaring world yet eks to grasp the mysteries of life and thereby satisfies her desires for social status and material comfort. In Sister Carrie, Dreir expresd his naturalistic pursuit by expounding the purpolessness of life and impotence of men.
5. Dreir’s literary naturalism (or American naturalism):
As a genre, naturalism emphasized heredity and environment as important deterministic forces shaping individualized characters who were prented in special and detailed circumstances. At bottom, life was shown to be ironic, even tragic. Dreir described earthly existence as “a welter of inscrutable forces,” in which was trapped each individual human being. In his words, Man is a “victim of forces over which he has no control.” To hi
m, life is "so sad, so strange, so mysterious and so inexplicable." No wonder the characters in his books are often subject to the control of the natural forces -- especially tho of environment and heredity.
6. Dreir’s naturalism in his works:
In Sister Carrie Dreir expresd his naturalistic pursuit by expounding the purpolessness of life and attacking the conventional moral standards.
新学期寄语幼儿园7. Dreir’s exploration of human desire and revelation of the dark side of human nature:
From the first novel Sister Carrie on, Dreir t himlf to project the American values for what he had found them to be --materialistic to the core. Living in such a society with such a value system, the human individual is obsd with a never-ending, yet meaningless arch for satisfaction of his desires. One of the desires is for money which was a motivating purpo of life in the United States in the late l9th century. For example,
in Sister Carrie, there is not one character who status is not determined economically. Sex is another human desire that Dreir explored to considerable lengths in his novels to reveal the dark side of human nature. In Sister Carrie, Carrie climbs up the social ladder by means of her xual appeal. Also in the “Trilogy of Desire,” the posssion of xual beauty symbolizes the acquisition of some social status of great magnitude. However, Dreir never forgot to imply that the human desires in life could hardly be defined. They are there like a powerful "magnetism" governing human existence and reducing human beings to nothing. So like all naturalists he was restrained from finding a solution to the social problems that appeared in his novels and accordingly almost all his works have tragic endings.
