What is the Regnant Theory of Naturalism, Anyway?

As there's confusion over basic procedural issues like how long a dissertation abstract should be (one single-spaced page, two single-spaced pages, five single-spaced pages), I figure there's no harm in asking a basic intellectual question:

What do you consider the dominant theory of naturalism?

If I'm to be redefining it, I ought to know what the majority of scholars think it is.  I'm tempted to follow Lisa Long, who, in her review of three recent attempts at defining naturalism, threw up her hands in defeat:

In the end, naturalism turns back on itself, becomes the uncategorizable category, precisely because the taxonomic and evolutionary tendency of literary history is naturalist in and of itself—concerned in its own way with determining what nineteenth-century critic Hippolyte Taine theorized as the ubiquitous "race, moment, and milieu" that have produced literary naturalism and other generic categories. American literary genres emerge as living, breathing, and ever-changing entities in these texts and in critical history as a whole; much collective scholarly energy has been spent, like that of biological taxonomists, looking for similarities between genres/"species" of literature, and hierarchicalizing those groups based on evolutionary relationships.

She identifies the current attempt to define naturalism as one more lost battle in a long, unwinnable war ... which means the best I can accomplish in my introduction is another pointed setback in an unending campaign of failure.  Of course, I could really surrender and claim, as one critic recently did, that naturalism is "less a movement than a jumble of proffered peculiarities."  The mind rails against the brutal honesty of that definition, but I admire its bravado.

So which naturalism should I be redefining?  The most current consensus?  The most powerful? 

Comments

[Mike S]

Scott, is it necessary that you arrive at some sort of pleasing-to-all-parties theory of naturalism? If Long can't put here finger on it, and if you consider her opinion timely and credible, couldn't you just *acknowledge* this lack of consensus, rather than reducing naturalism's "proffered peculiarities" to an always tenuous "dominant theory"?

I suppose the real issue here is how your chosen theory of naturalism speaks to, illuminates, and/or validates the central claims of your diss.

[Stephen]

Scott, since much of your dissertation is devoted to overturning Hofstadter's account of social Darwinism, perhaps the way to go would be to look at how other Cold War intellectuals (i.e., Lionel Trilling, in "Reality in America," plus many many others) defined naturalism. I.e., you could argue that 1950s critics like Trilling established a concept of naturalism still broadly influential today, based upon a mistaken understanding of evolutionary thinking in the late nineteenth / early twentieth century.

[Jonathan Dresner]

My advisor once wrote that "At times history is so illogical that only tautologies are completely true." (Albert Craig, Choshu in the Meiji Restoration, p. 20, n. 4.)

I usually think of genre the same way: I've rarely found discussions of "is it or isn't it" or "how do you define..." to be terribly productive. I'm an unapologetic atheorist. Or just lazy, perhaps, but it works.

[middlebrow]

That's what the opening and closing panels of the ALA conference on Naturalism were designed to address. I still don't feel like I have a clear answer. I think I like a version of Robert Frost's answer when he was asked to define poetry: "Poetry is what poets write." Naturalism is what naturalists write. A version of Drezner's advice to stick to tautologies, perhaps.

[Prefer not to.]

As a longtime acephalous reader who on occasion toils in the (wheat)fields of naturalism, my idea would be a combination of Mike S and Stephen. It matters what you're arguing against, which is a longstanding cold war idea of the genre, but it also matters that, at present, rigid genre distinctions fall apart. The center doesn't hold, and your work provides another layer to our current understanding of "naturalisms."