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Emile Zola: La Terre
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A journalist turned novelist, Zola is probably best known for the courageous stand he took when he published his open letter entitled "J'Accuse". The article, declaring the innocence of an army officer framed and convicted of treason, resulted in Zola's own conviction of libel, exile and bankruptcy. Though Zola died before it was over, the press sensation caused the officer's case to be reopened. The man was later exonerated, and freed from Devil's Island.
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The Life of Emile Zola appears in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 on this single-sided, double-layered DVD; due to those dimensions, the image has not been enhanced for 16X9 televisions. While the transfer of Zola didn’t remotely compete with the visuals of era-mates like Gone With the Wind, the picture held its own for a flick from 1937.
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Zola's store owner Mouret is another marketing genius. Like Boucicaut, he is "an unparalleled master was in the internal layout of the shops. He made an absolute rule that no corner of Au Bonheur des Dames should remain empty; everywhere, he demanded noise, people, life … because life, he said, attracts life, breeds and multiplies. All sort of practical consequences derived from this rule. If he had known how, he would have made the street run through his shop."
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Zola's house is across the SNCF tracks, in Médan, within sight of the riverfront installations. In this house he wrote 'Nana,' 'Germinal,' 'La Terre' and 'La Bête Humaine.' In this house he entertained friends such as the Goncourt brothers, Cezanne and Maupassant. The site is well-preserved and is pretty much as he left it, and as a museum it was inaugurated in 1985.
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The main activity of this subject is the essential reading of novels by Emile Zola. The bibliography should be read gradually throughout the course. It is important to have some experience of actually reading Zola's fiction before engaging on this type of critical contextualisation. Equally, by not leaving the general reading on Zola until the end of your study for this subject, you will become ever more able to allow such critical positions to exert a fruitful influence on your own close reading. After reading this introduction, you should then pursue the close reading of particular novels. You may do this in any order, although you should certainly leave Le Docteur Pascal till last.
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Zola set out his fundamental theoretical beliefs in Le Roman expérimental (1880), but even he adhered very loosely to them in practice. Naturalism embraced many of the tenets of the older realist movement, such as an interest in average types rather than above-average individuals, the cultivation of a pessimistic and disillusioned outlook, a studious avoidance of surprising incident, and a strict obedience to consequential logic in plot development. The special innovation of naturalism lay in its attempt to fuse science with literature. This meant, in practice, that human behavior had to be interpreted along strictly materialistic or physiological lines ("the soul being absent," as Zola put it) and that the individual was to be shown as totally at the mercy of twin external forces, heredity and environment. The emphasis placed on environment accounts for the immense pains that Zola took to document the setting he proposed to use in any particular novel.
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