The impact of naturalism, a literary approach invented by Zola and especially significant in the field of the novel through his American “disciples” Crane, Norris, and Dreiser, is well acknowledged and recognized. Not so well recognized, but equally important, is naturalistic theatre: this was a style that also originated with Zola, but its progeny was more international and its significance more radical and insurrectionary than in the less “spectacular” genre of fiction.
Speaker Philip Beitchman, a writer in residence in the Library’s Wertheim Study, received his PhD in comparative literature from The City University of New York and teaches world literature at Medgar Evers College, CUNY. He is the author of I Am a Process with No Subject (1988); Alchemy of the Word: Cabala of the Renaissance (1998); and The View from Nowhere : Essays in Literature, Mysticism and Philosophy (2001).