Once a software application has been implemented and released, that is by no means the end of development. There are all kinds of causes requiring software to be changed, from users reporting bugs, through changes in third-party software, to updates for improved performance. A critical skill of software developers is the ability to understand and update a program’s algorithm. For this Assignment, you will update an existing Java program using the NetBeans IDE. You will use the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment to make changes to an existing NetBeans Java Project. This existing program correctly sorts the data without using threads and contains a method (threadedSort) that you will update to sort the data using threads. To prepare: Read this week’s Resources. Download and Install NetBeans: Visit the NetBeans download page from this week’s Resources. Download the Java SE bundle. (Note: Select the most recent release version, not a Beta version.) Run the downloaded package to install it. Choose the default options for installation. Unzip and open the Unthreaded Program: Download and unzip the file Week2_Project.zip. This will create a folder containing a NetBeans Project with the non-threaded java program. Note the location of this folder. Launch the NetBeans IDE. Click the Open Project... button NetBeans Open Project... icon (Or click the File drop-down menu and select Open Project…). Navigate to the project folder, select it, and click Open Project. The Java Project contains three class files: MergeSort.java, Sort.java, and SortTest.java. Double-click each file in the Project section (at the left of the NetBeans IDE window) to display the file’s contents. Each of the Java class files contains comments explaining the purpose of the class and the purpose of the class’ methods. By Day 7, modify the Java program by adding threads, and analyze the performance of both the threaded and non-threaded versions. Modify the Program: Improve the performance of the Java program by adding threads to the Sort.java file. Implement the threadedSort() method within the Sort class. Reuse any of the existing methods by calling them as necessary from your threadedSort method. You may add additional methods to the Sort class, if necessary. Analyze the Program: When running the provided SortTest program, the output presents data to support analyzing the performance of the threaded and non-threaded sort methods. Analyze your threaded implementation by comparing its performance to the original non-threaded implementation and explain the measured behavior. Document your analysis as a short paper (1–3 pages), using APA format. Be sure to discuss the relative performance improvement you expect for your threaded implementation and how the expected performance compares to the measured performance. FORMS OF REALISM AND NATURALISM The two great literary movements of the late nineteenth century were realism and naturalism. The term realism refers to a movement in English, European, and American literature that gathered force from the 1830s to the end of the century. As defined by William Dean Howells, the magazine editor who was for some decades the chief American advocate of realist aesthetics as well as the author of over thirty novels, including The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), realism “is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” But truthful treatment of material depends on the material in question; Henry James spoke of the documentary value of Howells’s work, thereby calling attention to realism’s preoccupation with the observable surfaces of the world in which fictional characters lived, surfaces that made the world seem lifelike to readers. Characters in Howells’s novels were “representative,” that is, composites of the sort of people readers thought they already knew, people without fame or huge fortunes, without startling accomplishments or immense abilities. By contrast, the realism practiced by Edith Wharton and Henry James focused on the interior moral and psychological lives of upper-class people, although always taking care in describing these people’s surroundings. Wharton and James hoped to convince readers—most of whom were from the middle class—that the inner lives of the privileged were in accord with p. 10 the truths of human nature. Wealthy people had what working people did not—time to develop and display their inner selves; they were just like everybody else, although more so. In novels such as The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), and The Age of Innocence (1920), Wharton depicts the intangibles of thwarted desire, self-betrayal, hostile emotion, and repressed voices. At times, her accounts of the struggles of individuals p. 10p. 1272 such as Lily Bart of The House of Mirth to survive in a seemingly pleasant but actually hostile society reflect an almost Darwinian view of upper-class life, a naturalistic vision of human struggle; this is not the pleasant world of Howells’s well-meaning characters, but it is no less “realistic.” Realist writers believed in the power of language to represent reality in ways that were aesthetically satisfying and true to their sense of the world. But realism could never once and for all convey the real world through language; the world was always out there waiting for another writer to decide how to treat it. What they were trying to represent was always able to elude their desire to fix it in print; but that did not stop them from trying. Two of the most acclaimed artists of the era—Mark Twain and Henry James—understood that language was an interpretation of the real rather than the real thing itself. As a western writer, Twain worked within a tradition of vernacular tale-telling, which some later writers saw as the essence of a truly American style. Because this style was already an exaggeration, it could not truly be called “realistic” in the Howellsian sense; and Twain’s later work is infused with pessimism and social critique well beyond the realistic norm. James, beginning with recognizably realistic fiction, using a large cast of individualized, although usually upper-class characters described by an all-knowing narrator, as in The American (1876), developed increasingly subtle metaphorical and proto-modernistic representations of the flow of a character’s inner thought—the so-called “stream of consciousness”—as in The Golden Bowl (1904). Naturalism can be thought of as a version of realism, or as an alternative to it. Literary naturalists, unlike the realists for whom human beings defined themselves within recognizable settings, wrote about human life as it was shaped by forces beyond human control. For them, their view was truly realistic, while Howellsian realism was a form of prettifying. Naturalism introduces characters from the fringes and depths of society, far from the middle class, whose lives really do spin out of control; their fates are seen to be the outcome of degenerate heredity, a sordid environment, and the bad luck that can often seem to control the lives of people without money or influence. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1870) theorized that human beings had developed over the ages from nonhuman forms of life, successfully adapting to changing environmental conditions. Darwin was not interested in the social world, but in the 1870s, the English philosopher Herbert Spencer applied Darwin’s evolutionary theory of the “survival of the fittest” to human groups. This idea was enthusiastically welcomed by many leading American businessmen. Andrew Carnegie, for example, argued that unrestrained competition was the equivalent of a law of nature designed to eliminate those unfit for the new economic order. For the novelists, naturalism was thought to make their work scientific—thus truly realistic—rather than romantic. Émile Zola (1840–1902), the p. 11 influential French theorist and novelist, wrote in his influential essay “The Experimental Novel” (1880): We must operate with characters, passions, human and social data as the chemist and the physicist work on inert bodies, as the physiologist works on living bodies. Determinism governs everything. It is scientific investigation; it is experimental reasoning that combats one by one the hypotheses of the idealists and will replace novels of pure imagination by novels of observation and experiment. p. 11p. 1273 A number of American writers adopted aspects of Zola’s form of naturalism, though each brought naturalism into his or her work in different ways, to different degrees, and combined with other perspectives. At some level they all understood that they were fabulists, not scientists, and ultimately none of them was willing to sacrifice some idea of human life as meaningful. Even the statement that life has no meaning is, after all, a meaningful statement; there is no escape from this paradox. Naturalists wanted to explore how biology, environment, and other material forces shaped lives—particularly the lives of lower-class people, who supposedly had less control over their lives than those who were better off. In this respect, naturalism is an intervention that strives to make lower-class lives comprehensible to the middle-class readers who comprised the main audience for fiction. Thus, Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and Frank Norris all allowed in different degrees for the value of human beings, for their potential to make some measure of sense out of their experience, and for their capacity to act compassionately—even altruistically—under the most adverse circumstances. Even though, therefore, they were challenging conventional wisdom about human motivation and causality in the natural world, the bleakness and pessimism sometimes found in their fiction are not the same as despair and cynicism. Careful reading of such Ambrose Bierce stories as “Chicamauga” and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” reveals his awareness of fiction as a tool to explore inner truths. Stephen Crane, too, did not believe that environment counts for everything, though he said of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) that it does count for a great deal in determining human fate. Not every person born in a slum becomes a criminal, drunkard, or suicide; and Crane clearly depicts Maggie’s final action in the novella as her considered choice. In “The Blue Hotel” the earth is described in one of the most famous passages in naturalistic fiction as a “whirling, fire-smote, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb.” But questions of responsibility and agency are still alive at the end of the story. In Crane’s Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, the main character Henry Fleming responds throughout to the world of chaos and violence that surrounds him with alternating surges of panic and self-congratulations, not as a man who has fully understood himself and his place in the world. And yet, Henry has learned something; Crane, like most naturalists, is more ambiguous, more accepting of paradoxes, than a simplified notion of naturalism would suggest. Biology, environment, psychological drives, and chance play a large part in shaping human ends in Crane’s fiction. But these thematic matters are inflected by his distinct literary style, which merges honest reportage with p. 12 impressionistic literary techniques to present incomplete characters and a broken world—a world more random than scientifically predictable. We are also left, however, with the hardly pessimistic implications of “The Open Boat”: that precisely because human beings are exposed to a savage world of chance where death is always imminent, they would do well to learn the art of sympathetic identification with others and how to practice solidarity, an art often learned at the price of death. After all, a belief in the meaning of deeply felt human connection is Crane’s final sense of reality in this story. Theodore Dreiser did not share Crane’s tendency to use words and images as if he were a composer or painter. Like Crane, he tended to see men and women as victims of their destinies rather than creators of their lives. But p. 12p. 1274 his significance for readers lies in his cumulative technique that represents the solidity of the world in which his characters are entrapped. If Crane gave American readers a new sense of human consciousness under conditions of extreme pressure, Dreiser gave them in novels such as Sister Carrie (1900) and Jennie Gerhardt (1911) a sense of the fumbling, yearning, confused response to the simultaneously enchanting, exciting, ugly, and dangerous metropolis that had become home to such large numbers of Americans by the turn of the century. Like Dreiser, Abraham Cahan wrote about city dwellers, in particular about eastern European Jews who, starting in 1882, had been coming to the United States in large numbers. Many of these Yiddish-speaking immigrants settled in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Cahan’s major novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) explores the tensions entailed in attempts to reconcile traditional values and ways of living with American modernity in an urban work that, in the manner of literary naturalists, puts into conflict individual agency with larger social and natural forces, while providing new perspectives on ethnicity. Cahan’s stories also explore themes of immigrant assimilation. In Jack London’s most successful works, such as his novels The Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea-Wolf (1904), along with most of his nearly two hundred short stories, there are currents of myth and romance. London was notoriously inconsistent—a socialist and an individualist, a believer in Anglo-Saxon superiority who attacked white racism and colonialism. Most of his short story “The Law of Life” (1901) recounts Old Koshkoosh’s memories, especially his youthful encounter with a dying moose set upon by wolves. Koshkoosh himself, an imagined recreation of an indigenous person, has been left to die by his tribe as is customary, London suggests, when people reach extreme old age. He thinks: “Nature did not care. To life she set one task, gave one law. To perpetuate was the task of life, its law is death.” This thought suggests a deterministic view of life, but what London underscores in the overall story is that acts of imagination and identification lend meaning and dignity to human existence. In sum, despite conventional notions that insisted on humanity’s elevated place in the universe and a middle-class readership that disliked ugliness and “immorality,” urban America and the sparsely populated hinterlands proved to be fertile ground for realistic literary techniques and naturalistic ideas, though the ideas were often inconsistently applied and the documentary techniques usually interwoven with other literary strategies. Crucial to American writing during this period, realism and naturalism took on many forms and exposed readers to a wide range of subjects and perspectives.