Grapes Of Wrath Research Articles

THE IDEA OF POST-WAR AMERICA IN SELECTED NOVELS BY STEINBECK AND DOS PASSOS

This article attempts to study the idea of the ‘Other’ according to John Dos Passos (1896-1970) and John Steinbeck (1902-1968). The researcher has analyzed the position of the two authors towardsmajor post-war issues. Throughout the article, the researcher highlights numerous social, racial, gender, political, and economic issues that arose as a result of the aftermath of the First World War. The appropriation of the New Historicist theory enablesus to make a historical and literary diagnosis of John Dos Passosand Steinbeck’s fiction. The researcher has endeavored to demonstrate that both Dos Passos and Steinbeck share the same idea, position, and vision towards a fragmented, class-based, ‘white supremacist’ and capitalist post-war America. The following novels have been analyzed from the perspective of racial and gender discrimination for the purpose of the research: Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat (1935), Of Mice and Men (1937), The Grapes of Wrath (1939); and Dos Passos’ trilogy U.S.A (1938).This paper also explores another post-war theme - the proletariat vs. big business struggle.The proletariat theme is an influential part of Dos Passos’ fictional trilogy and Steinbeck’s epic novel The Grapes of Wrath. The researcher endeavours to demonstrate that the two authors share the idea that postwar America is composed of two-nations - ‘proletariat’ and the privileged.

ПРОБЛЕМА ЧЕЛОВЕКА В РОМАНАХ ДЖ. СТЕЙНБЕКА «ГРОЗДЬЯ ГНЕВА» И «ЗИМА ТРЕВОГИ НАШЕЙ»

In J. Steinbeck’s creative work the problem of a human being, personality is one of the key ones. In his biggest novels - “The Grapes of Wrath” and “The Winter of Our Discontent” - the writer discovers the problems of human existence in the unfa-vourable social environment, the problems of protecting the rights and worldview of an individual. Following the tradition of Honoré de Balzac and Theodore Dreiser, J. Steinbeck identifies the circumstances, which turned the Joad family into home-less vagrants (“The Grapes of Wrath”) and facilitated Ethan Hawley’s moral decline (“The Winter of Our Discontent”).

American Dreams ft. David Lynch

American Dreams ft. David Lynch Niels Niessen (bio) We’re like the dreamer who dreams and then lives inside the dream. But who is the dreamer? —Twin Peaks: The Return (created by Mark Frost and David Lynch, 2017, U.S.) “Hello, you’re tuned into Interview Project. Today we’re meeting Suzy. Suzy is Daniela’s aunt. Enjoy the interview.” Or: “Hello, you’re tuned into Interview Project. Today we’re meeting Darryl. Darryl is waiting to buy a ranch in Montana. Enjoy the interview.” We’re tuned into Interview Project, a web-based series of 121 video portraits directed by Austin Lynch and Jason S. The videos are about four minutes each and they were posted online every three days between June 2009 and Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. David Lynch presents: [End Page 31] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. The image scrambles while tuning in on Lynch. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Welcome to Interview Project. May 2010. Together they document the road trip Lynch, Jason S., and their team made across a small-town United States that remains unseen by the interstate traveler. It is a portrait of a nation reminiscent of John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath, Travels with Charley) as well as Walter Evans’s American Photographs of the Great Depression, and it is in the vein of those Great-American works that Interview Project captures the dilapidated state of the American dream. [End Page 32] TUNING INTO AMERICA Interview Project was produced by Absurda, the production company of David Lynch, Austin’s father, and the project is also hosted on David Lynch’s website: interviewproject.davidlynch.com. Although Lynch—David, that is—did not go along on the trip, he does introduce each of the videos, in his own Lynchian way, and above all in the same way each time. We press “play” and the scrambling image makes it seem like we’ve just powered on one of those old-school color televisions from the time color television was still a new medium. Once the image has stabilized on a close-up of his face, Lynch welcomes the viewer: “Hello, you’re tuned into Interview Project. Today we’re meeting Spira” (Figures 1–3). As always, Lynch’s spirits are high. He is seated in front of a concrete wall and a yellow chest of drawers, while he’s wearing a blue suit and a white, tieless shirt that is completely buttoned up. His silver hair is combed yet messy and contrasts nicely with the wall. Cut to a medium-long, awkwardly high-angled shot that shows him sitting at a giant desk in a space that Lynch followers will recognize as his Los Angeles studio, from where for a while he also broadcast his odd daily weather reports, and which also forms the setting for the 2016 documentary David Lynch: The Art Life (d. Jon Nguyen, Rick Barnes, U.S./Denmark). Like so many others in this online era, Lynch has been working a lot from home lately. On his desk—messy-arranged as Lynch himself—there is an ashtray, a box of drawing utensils, a red shiny ball the size of an apple, a steaming cup of coffee (brewed, we assume, from his own signature blend), while a ray of sunlight casts all of this in a homely glow. “Spira used to dance to The Doors at the Whisky-a-Go-Go.” Cut to the original camera position. Lynch smiles: “Enjoy the interview,” upon which the intro dissolves into a disclaimer that “the views expressed in these interviews are those of the participants alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Interview Project or its sponsors.” The portraits themselves are utterly sincere slices of American life. Take episode 3, which shows Kee, whom the team met in a Navajo reservation in Tuba City, Arizona (Figure 4). “Hello, my name is K, K.J., I go by K.J., but my name is Kee Jackson.” Kee is framed in close-up against the backdrop of the red rocks of the Arizona desert. His mouth twitches, he seems a little nervous...

FOSTERING AND PRESERVING THE STRENGTH AND DIGNITY OF A MAN WITH REFERENCE TO JUANA IN JOHN STEINBECK’S THE PEARL

John Steinbeck was a prolific and popular writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. His strength as an artist lies as much in converting the topical into universal. Steinbeck’s women characters are stronger than their male counterparts. They try to be perfect counterparts to their men by making active contribution to their domestic, social, economic and political life. Undoubtedly, their prime concern is their duty towards their family, but they are not blind to the happenings around. A living example of it is Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Juana in The Pearl (1947). For instance, one may perceive both the angel and the tigress in Ma Joad and Juana. This paper aims to study on how Juana as a representative of womankind plays the role of fostering and preserving the strength and dignity of his man, Kino in the novella The Pearl.

SEMIOTICS IN JOHN STEINBECK’S “GRAPE OF WRATH”

This article analyzes signs aspects of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath by using the Pierce’s concept of semiotics. This article analyzes the semiotic aspects of Steibeck’s The Grapes of Wrath by using the Pierce’s concept of symbolic that is symbol,iconic and index.Symbol in Steinbeck’s the grapes of wrath is road. Iconic in Steinbeck’s the Grapes of Wrath is music. Index in Steinbeck’s the Grapes of Wrath is bank.Keywords: Symbol,Iconic,Index

Voluntary Exploitation and Forced Assimilation: John Steinbeck's Critique of American Advertising in The Grapes of Wrath

History will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that.Malcolm MuggeridgeAt its most utilitarian level, advertising has as its purpose to facilitate the promotion and sale of particular commodities. However, as Judith Williamson argues, [Advertising] has another function, which I believe in many ways replaces that traditionally fulfilled by art or religion. It creates structures of meaning (Williamson 11). Those structures of meaning, as the above quote from Malcom Muggeridge suggests, may be perceived as having nefarious motivations; specifically advertising's aim is to keep us constantly wanting more. This suggests that in addition to being a cultural institution in the United States, advertising is a powerful force that we as consumers willingly enable in its efforts to exploit us. Advertising encourages us to constantly desire and, in order to fulfill those desires, to constantly acquire more and more commodities. As a result of this perpetual desiring and the resultant quest for satisfaction, those within a capitalist economic system find themselves enslaved by the system. Consumers work in order to purchase commodities that they believe will satisfy their desires. However, they soon discover that material goods do not deliver on their promises, and the desire for a new commodity appears. As there is no other option available to a consumer within a capitalist structure but to assimilate to this exploitative system, assimilation to the never-ending cycle is inevitable.It is this theme of voluntary exploitation and forced assimilation that is at play in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, the canonical American novel of Dust Bowl-era migrants looking for work and a better life. What they find, however, is that they are victims of the system, both as consumers and as commodities. The Joads are uneducated and unfamiliar with the oftentimes exploitive techniques incorporated into early twentieth-century advertising, and they fall prey to advertisements that exploit their human desires. Because of their ignorance of the darker motivations behind advertising, the Joads willingly allow themselves to be exploited by capitalism and the system's lieutenants that use them up and then cast them aside as disposable commodities.In his discussion of The Grapes of Wrath, Morris Dickstein writes,The plight and migration of the Joads [...], the Dust Bowl, the loss of a family home, the trek in search of work, the awful conditions for migrant farm labor, the struggle to keep the family together, became a metaphor for the Depression as a whole. This portrayal aroused sympathy and indignation that transcended literature and became part of our social history, as if Steinbeck had been reporting on a real family, which in a sense he was.(Dickstein 112)It was the moral outrage from the general American public that the novel elicited that, according to Dickstein and countless other Steinbeck scholars, earned the author the mantle of anticapitalist protest writer. And nowhere in his collected writings is his criticism of the capitalist system more apparent than in The Grapes of Wrath. As Dickstein suggests, Steinbeck's ability to verbally transport his reader to the time and place in the novel does tempt readers into accepting that the writer's pathos-laden tale of the Joad family is a story about the human cost of the environmental and economic catastrophe wrought by the Dust Bowl. That suffering and misery was intensified by the commercial culture that permeated the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, a culture that itself was fueled by advertising. And it is that culture that was the target of much of Steinbeck's social criticism in the novel.Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, Steinbeck was the third of four children born to middleclass parents. His mother was a former school teacher and his father worked as a manager in a flour mill at the time of John's birth. …

“They fix 'em so you can't win nothing”: Agency inThe Grapes of Wrath

AbstractWhile The Grapes of Wrath highlights specific social and institutional structures that direct the course of action of its main characters, shifting the analysis from structure to agency opens up the novel to new readings. This article considers how Steinbeck's novel problematizes agency and argues that it troubles distinctions between human agency and nonhuman agency. Traditional novels generally rely on the actions of their characters, but in The Grapes of Wrath such action is repeatedly thwarted or fails to lead to the desired outcome. Instead, the characters are acted on through various machines or chains of actors that lead back to a vague and bodiless entity, such as the monster-bank. The novel's emphasis on the tractor, the automobile, the handbill, and the bank provides the basis for my reading, together with more subtle instantiations of material agency as seen in the phonograph, the slot machine, the kerosene, and the sticker displayed on the red truck. Agency has traditionally rested on the notion of free will and intention, but recent theories, such as actor-network-theory, or ANT, highlight material agency and move beyond the subject in favor of networks and distribution of agency. This article uses theories on agency to reread Steinbeck's classic novel, but also attempts to show how Steinbeck's novel can increase our understanding of the concept of agency more broadly.

Steinbeck Today

Steinbeck Today

Thoughts from Algeria on Islamic Echoes in The Grapes of Wrath

Abstract This article sheds light on some echoes of Islamic principles in The Grapes of Wrath. Despite the fact that there exists extensive commentary on the religious orientation of some of Steinbeck's works (one thinks of the commentaries offered on Christian, and even Confucian and Judaic, elements of some works), up until now there has been no significant emphasis on Steinbeck's integration of Islamic elements into this text. This novel revolves around six main themes: minding one's own business, patience, the cave motif, dignity, usury, and the phalanx theory. Although there is no definitive proof of Steinbeck's purposeful incorporation of these Islamic themes, a careful reading of the novel illustrates that there are a number of echoes of Islam in The Grapes of Wrath.

A Sacred Bond Broken: The People versus the Land in The Grapes of Wrath

Abstract From beginning to end, “wrath” is the key word in John Steinbeck's monumental novel, The Grapes of Wrath—wrath not only over the dispossession of migrants, but wrath also over abuse of the earth, our home. For in this novel there is a strong sense that a sacred bond between people and the land—a living entity—has been broken. Fiercely, Steinbeck later proclaims in The Log from the Sea of Cortez that “the world is furrowed and cut, torn and blasted by man.” As Susan Shillinglaw has observed, The Grapes of Wrath “starts and ends with land misused by man: Oklahoma sharecroppers exhaust the soil and California owners waste the soil's bounty by dumping potatoes in a river and burning piles of oranges to keep the prices high”—both guilty of crimes in Steinbeck's view. And the human story is intricately tied to the land story. Without the land, there is only a nightmarish stasis for the Joads—although there is constant movement across a continent in search of work, they seem not to go anywhere, for they have left their hearts behind.

Filthy “Others” in 1990s Environmentalist Fiction: From Steinbeck to Boyle

Abstract T. C. Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain (1995) begins by paying homage to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939): Boyle's epigraph, quoted from Steinbeck's novel, creates a direct analogy between the Okies and the Mexican immigrants, their (im)migration, and their subsequent fate. Indeed, both novels protest against the Californians' attitude toward the weakened “Other” who struggles to make a living in their home state. As critics have noted, the parallels between the two novels are visible in various features, structural as well as thematic. Similar themes include the Californian Edenic dream, the economic depression, and a critique of consumer culture. I argue that a deeper similarity between the novels is their common preoccupation with filth. This focus, overlooked by scholars, can be read as part of an entire subgenre which I call “filth-fiction.” Exploring the novels' shared interest in the racial and socioeconomic significations of filth and the latter's connection to the ecological aspects, my article demonstrates how Tortilla—like the entire corpus of novels within this subgenre—carefully follows Steinbeck's lead despite the fact that it depicts a different racial layout. As my analysis shows, the impact of The Grapes of Wrath on contemporary U.S. fiction is evident, both in the representations of filthy “Others” and in the environmental awareness.

Is American Literary Naturalism Nature-Friendly?

Although naturalism in American literature marked a significant epoch at the turn of the twentieth century, it has not drawn much scholarly attention in recent years. As ecocriticism has taken a popular position in today`s literary studies, it is meaningful to rethink the fin-de-siecle literary movement from an ecocritical perspective in terms of literary depictions of nature and human nature. For the purpose of this comparative study, Jack London`s The Call of the Wild and “To Build a Fire,” Frank Norris`s McTeague, and John Steinbeck`s The Grapes of Wrath are chosen as sample naturalistic texts dealing with the naturalistic notion of nature, while Willa Cather`s My Antonia and N. Scott Momaday`s House Made of Dawn represent ecocritical texts on the same topic. By comparing the wide selections of naturalistic and ecocritical works, one may be able to map out the similarities and dissimilarities between the two literary trends and to rethink the broad spectrum of how nature and human nature are portrayed within the two frameworks of thoughts. (Hanbat National University)

Picturing Migrants: The Grapes of Wrath and New Deal Documentary Photography by James R. Swensen

Reviewed by: Picturing Migrants: The Grapes of Wrath and New Deal Documentary Photography by James R. Swensen David D. Vail Picturing Migrants: The Grapes of Wrath and New Deal Documentary Photography. By James R. Swensen. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. xi + 196 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 cloth. The 1930s is often considered through a historical lens as a decade of drought and depression. Most immediately think of Dorothea Lange’s 1936 “Migrant Mother” photograph, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, or Pare Lorentz’s film The Plow that Broke the Plains. But why? In Picturing Migrants, James R. Swensen insists the answer increasingly “depends less on personal experiences and more on the symbols and icons that have come to define this important period in American history” (3). Picturing Migrants highlights how, as the Farm Security Administration (FSA) assisted drought refugees from Oklahoma and other Great Plains states, photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Russell Lee captured despondent Americans trying to escape dangerous dust storms, drought, and depression. Swensen, though, broadens the scope to include other, lesser-known figures. “Authors and activists like Carey McWilliams, Sanora Babb, and Edwin Lanham also played a role, as did the photographer Horace Bristol” (6). Other FSA officials, such as a migrant camp director and regional bureaucrats, “were instrumental behind the scenes in shaping how the migrants were presented” (6). As Picturing Migrants presents these dynamic relationships through a powerful collection of images, new revelations emerge about the host of migrants, New Deal policymakers, and photographers of the decade. The ability to capture despondency and ecological disaster powerfully shaped American cultural responses and New Deal policies. However, the FSA also deeply informed John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. In subsequent chapters, Swensen traces how Roy Stryker (chief of the FSA’s historical section), various migrant accounts, and Resettlement Administration camp programs all represented “verbal pictures” for Steinbeck to understand a “common experience” of drought and depression refugees leaving the Great Plains for the West (38). Swensen is also clear that both Steinbeck’s book and the FSA photographs did not sit well with those Great Plains residents traveling along Highway 99—the so-called Dirty Plate Trail (21). Moreover, Picturing Migrants reveals how interwoven influences of FSA photography, personal accounts, and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath crystallized to create a potent avatar of the 1930s. Swensen offers an engaging book mixed with an array of compelling historical photographs and well-researched prose that powerfully illustrate how New Deal FSA photographs “have shaped the national memory and have come to represent a defining period of American history. … [T]hey are, simply put, the image that come to mind when we think of the Great Depression” (196). [End Page 237] David D. Vail Department of History, University of Nebraska at Kearney Copyright © 2017 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood ed. by Austen Barron Bailly

Reviewed by: American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood ed. by Austen Barron Bailly Patricia Oman Austen Barron Bailly, ed., American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood. New York: Delmonico Books/Prestel, 2015. 240pp. $60.00. In 1937, Thomas Hart Benton went to Hollywood on assignment for Life magazine and ended up taking commissions for movie publicity art for several decades. This book explores his multifaceted relationship with Hollywood: as a bemused but fascinated outsider, as a critic and supporter of Hollywood-endorsed American myths, and as an artist willing to bridge the gap between high and low art. American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood is a beautiful and critically significant publication that accompanies a traveling exhibition of the same name organized collaboratively by the Peabody Essex Museum, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. With over 230 illustrations, including eighty-two full-color plates, the book could serve as a career retrospective of the artist. In fact, the book includes full-color reproductions of many of Benton’s major and/or famous works, including the American Historical Epic mural series [End Page 124] (1920–28), lithographs commissioned by 20th Century Fox for the 1940 film adaptation of Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, and his shockingly violent wwII propaganda paintings, including Exterminate! (1942) and Invasion (1942). One of the highlights of the book is Sarah N. Chasse’s “Benton, Hollywood, and History: A Timeline,” which is a chronological montage of images relating to Benton’s career as a painter and book illustrator, from photographs of the artist at work, to book covers, to stills from influential films. This photo essay brings together many of the book’s themes and makes a convincing visual connection between Benton and Hollywood. Another highlight is the collection of sixteen graphite and ink drawings that Benton made in 1937 based on his experiences in Hollywood. These drawings, which vary from rough sketches to polished scenes, demonstrate his fascination with the mechanics and intricacies of the Hollywood industry. The fact that most of these drawings are held in private collections also attests to the hard work that went into organizing this project. Perhaps the most entertaining highlight of the book is a previously unpublished (and unfinished) essay titled “Hollywood Journey” by Benton himself. Based on his 1937 visit to Hollywood, Benton observes unflinchingly, “A moving picture story conference while it deals with emotional charged fictions is not by any means a conference of artists free for a moment from economic pressures and engaged in the simple business of finding a vehicle for the expression of their life experiences. The moving picture Art is predominantly an economically conditioned Art. Its forms are like gambling in the stock market. They are plays for a cash return” (24). His description of the movie “Napoleon,” a businessman who has an “absolutely unapproachable genius” (25) for selecting stories that will make money, would not be out of place in a Mark Twain satire. Considering the number of commissions he received from Hollywood, the critical nature of this essay may be the reason the prolific Benton never finished or published it during his lifetime. Navigating the book is like navigating a Benton mural, however. One doesn’t know quite where to begin, and the reader is sometimes expected to work harder than anticipated to understand the modernist juxtapositions of text and image. Nine long essays and six mini-essays are organized into small (unnamed) thematic units, with full-color figures and plates interspersed throughout. Some of these units make the link between Benton and [End Page 125] Hollywood explicit. Editor Austen Barron Bailly’s long essay “True West: Thomas Hart Benton and American Epics” works well as a unit with John Herron’s mini-essay “John Ford, Thomas Hart Benton, and the American Frontier” and Margaret C. Conrads’ mini-essay “The Grapes of Wrath in Pictures.” Barron Bailly argues that Benton independently produced the fourteen-panel American Historical Epic “to participate in public debates about who and what was authentically American” (32), critiquing Manifest Destiny and the violence behind American colonization. In later western landscapes of the 1950s and 1960s, she argues...

Austrian and Dustbowl Refugees Unite in Three Faces West (1940)

Abstract Released in July 1940, a little over two years after Austria had been incorporated into Nazi Germany and ceased to exist as an independent state, Bernard Vorhaus's Three Faces West takes a bold stand on contemporary issues through its Austrian-American romance. The filmmakers use the dire situation of farmers in a drought-ravaged area to elicit sympathy for the refugees from Europe and to challenge nativist and isolationist attitudes. The film features two refugees from Vienna, Austria—a renowned surgeon (Charles Coburn) and his attractive daughter (Sigrid Gurie)—who must adjust to living in a rural community in the American heartland. When the celluloid Americans meet these foreign individuals, serious cultural commentaries emerge. The promise of unity between foreigners and American-born is most pronounced when the young Austrian woman and the handsome, farmer protagonist (John Wayne) fall in love. In this rare Austrian-American romance set in the United States, the filmmakers counter perceptions of the refugees as alien others and suggest that cultural differences can easily be overcome. By weaving together the stories of the Austrians fleeing Hitler and their American counterparts fleeing the Dust Bowl, the film proposes a radical alternative to the misery of the displaced Americans familiar from the news and presented most graphically in John Ford's filming of John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath (March 1940).

City Profile: Stratford, Ontario

WORLDLIT.ORG 5 For half the year, the hamlet of Stratford , Ontario—named after the birthplace of William Shakespeare—is much like any other small North American town. But in April, the town’s atmosphere changes overnight. Lifeless buildings are suddenly transformed into theaters, production studios, and rehearsal halls. Through October, the quiet streets are full of cars and buses and the odd carriage ride. And every gift shop within the city limits is packed with tourists hoping to take a little of Shakespeare home with them. Since its start in the summer of 1953, Stratford, Ontario, has become associated with some of the most notable Shakespeare productions in the modern era. Its inaugural performance of Richard III featured the talents of Alec Guinness and Irene Worth. The town’s high standard for actors has continued ever since. Now an internationally recognized event, people come from all over the world to take part in the Stratford Festival. Over the years, the productions in each season have varied—from Shakespeare, old classics, and new plays debuting for the first time—though there is always at least one production of the Bard’s work being performed. The year I attended, not only did I get to see Twelfth Night or What You Will and Richard III but also classic greats such as The Grapes of Wrath and My Fair Lady (with the original Bernard Shaw ending replacing the modified one from the musical adaptation). One of the great things about the city’s productions of Shakespeare are the different ways they reimagine the settings and show how adaptable and relatable the stories are. For instance, Twelfth Night had a new twist: instead of sixteenthcentury Illyria, the sets and costumes were reimagined in a fantastical steampunk style, adding to the light and comedic sense of the play. This year, on the 150th anniversary of Canada’s independence, the festival will be putting on iconic classics such as Guys and Dolls, Treasure Island, and Romeo and Juliet. Stratford isn’t just about its plays, though. During the day the streets are lined with trees, pots overflowing with flowers, and an atmosphere of calm merrymaking by tourists and residents alike. Running around the city is the Avon River, which forms Lake Victoria with its classic Juliett III boat tours. For those wishing to take in the quaint atmosphere, there are also bikes for rent to explore the historic downtown area. When night falls the area becomes deserted, but only because everyone is hitting the local pubs to wind down. The main pub for the actors to hang out in—at least when I was there—was the Boar’s Head. Attached to the Queen’s Inn, the inside of the pub smells like an old library crossed with a 1920s speakeasy: old leather, older wood, musky cigar smoke, and just a touch of the good stuff. It’s a great place to pull up a stool at the bar, try your luck at a game of pool or darts, or find a small booth for reading. Anna Hernandez, a WLT intern, is currently working on her MA in library science at the University of Oklahoma. photo : richard bain Notebook city profile Stratford, Ontario by Anna Hernandez ...

The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl by Sarah D. Wald

Reviewed by: The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl by Sarah D. Wald Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao Sarah D. Wald, The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2016. 297 pp. Cloth, $90; paper, $30. Blending literary history and environmental cultural scholarship, Sarah D. Wald's The Nature of California examines an extraordinarily broad range of literary and artistic works focused on California's multiethnic agricultural experiences from the Great Depression to the twenty-first century (1929–2014). Wald's interdisciplinary study provides a fascinating examination of the interconnectedness among representations of citizenship (national belonging), race (whiteness and racial otherness), and the environment (land ownership and agricultural labor). Wald returns to Thomas Jefferson's "Query XIX" in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) and J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782) to identify two dominant discourses about American national belonging. Jefferson imagined American citizenship as belonging to the farmer (white, male, free, and landowning). This citizen farmer, however, is constructed through the negation of its racial other—the African slave. Crèvecoeur imagined American national belonging through the language of nature—European immigrants as plants to be "replanted" in the United States, a process of "naturalization" resulting in a "new race of man" (8). Wald deftly explores how California's literature and art have focused on agricultural experiences that reinforce, contest, or reimagine the racialized and gendered discourses of national belonging articulated by Jeffersonian agrarianism and Crèvecoeur's "politics of the natural." Wald examines representations of Dust Bowl migrant workers in various texts of the Great Depression—Carey McWilliams's Factories in the Field (1939), Ruth Comfort Mitchell's Of Human Kindness (1940), John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and Sanora Babb's Whose Names Are Unknown (written in 1939 and published in 2004). These texts dramatize the displacement of landless Dust Bowl migrants as "a crisis of white citizenship" (74). In response to this crisis, McWilliams, Mitchell, and Steinbeck reinforce white land ownership (Jeffersonian agrarianism) at the expense of racialized [End Page 350] others—Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, Filipinos, and Mexican Americans. Babb, however, dramatizes the ability of Dust Bowl migrants to form solidarity with working-class African American and Filipino characters, thereby denaturalizing the racial hierarchy inherent in Jeffersonian agrarianism. Hiroshi Nakamura's posthumously published Treadmill (1996), a novel about Japanese American internment written during internment, functions as a critique of Jeffersonian racial scripts in representing Japanese American life. Treadmill envisions antiracist activism and international solidarity between oppressed peoples as keys to addressing the crisis of racism and citizenship within the United States. Read in relation to the Catholic Worker movement, Hisaye Yamamoto's short stories—"Seventeen Syllables" (1949) and "Yoneko's Earthquake" (1951)—reveal how interracial working-class solidarity is central to denaturalizing race, citizenship, and patriarchy. Representations of Filipinos and Mexicans laboring as abject aliens are examined in works by Carlos Bulosan and Ernesto Galarza. Wald reads the American landscape in Bulosan's America Is in the Heart (1946) within the context of his anticolonial literary imagination—his "desire for democracy and land in the Philippines" (144). Ernesto Galarza's Strangers in Our Fields (1956) critiques the Bracero Program as a process of denationalization. For Bulosan and Galarza interracial working-class solidarity is key to addressing the exploitation and denationalization of Filipinos and Mexicans as a colonized labor force. Wald reminds us that working-class solidarity between Filipinos and Mexicans launched the United Farm Workers (UFW) in the 1960s. Wald examines the cultural texts of the UFW (the work of El Teatro Campesino and images from the UFW newspaper El Malcriado) within the context of 1960s and 1970s environmentalism in a way that historicizes and engages contradictions within the contemporary alternative food movement. While a consumer-focused approach privileges twenty-first-century notions of neoliberal citizenship (individual consumption), a worker-focused approach provides a systemic understanding of health and wellness within society. The latter approach is central to Helena María Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and the cultural production of artists [End Page 351] involved in the contemporary migrant...

Genre

Genre Larry Fondation (bio) Manchette, Simenon, Topor, Izzo. Names we do not know here in the United States. Maybe Simenon, but then only through his Maigret novels, not his dark, psychological explorations, such as The Clockmaker (1955). In Europe—particularly in France—these are the names of major writers. What the hell, we could even add the name Albert Camus to the list—notably his most famous novel, The Stranger (1942). In the United States, we call similar writers genre writers, crime writers, pulp fiction authors—well, maybe we don’t even call them authors. We might call them “hacks.” We pigeonhole such writers, we use taxonomy to categorize them, we label them—like avid zoologists naming a new species of bug—Family, Genus, Species. All our nomenclature seeks to peg such authors into some secondary status—a notch, or much more, below serious American literature. In “Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War,” Woody Haut writes “hardboiled writing has been marginalized precisely because it is a class-based literature.” Meanwhile, Swedish Academy member Horace Engdahl (one of 18 who vote the Nobel Prize for Literature) has said that American writers are “too isolated, too insular” and “they don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.” While few would argue that Europe is the center of the literary universe any longer, Engdahl has a point—mainstream American writing isn’t either. Literary fiction in the US has become de facto conservative. Even the most corporate contemporary American visual artists, such as Jeff Koons, are more adventurous than US writers that emerge from MFA programs, largely the refuge of the rich and the privileged. About a year ago, a recent college graduate approached me at a university cocktail party. He wanted to be a writer. He told me that he was very frugal, that he had saved $80,000 on his own, and he was trying to decide whether to get an MFA or travel around the world. I was impressed with his ability to save money, not necessarily my strongest point. I took out my phone and began to show him the cost of flights to Japan, Vietnam and other faraway places. The choice was clear—to me anyway. Engdahl calls the professionalization of writing insular. He’s right, though his framing of the issue is incomplete—Europe may be insular by history, but America is insular by will. In our literature, as in our society as a whole, we prefer to ignore the poor, despite their growing number. We cling on to our stubborn and insane belief in a classless country. The new American canon is upper middle class—Franzen, Chabon, and others—all competent writers who write about a world most people in the world can never know, let alone care about. To make up for the gap of writing about the poor in the United States, the mainstream literary reviews have increased their coverage of Latin American and African writers and very recent immigrants with clear links to the struggles of their native lands. This is a good thing. Writers like NoViolet Bulawayo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, among many others, need to be read. But where do you read about poor Americans? Where are the Algrens? The Wrights? The Ellen Glasgows? A few years ago, in an interview in France, I said that NWA’s Straight Outta Compton (1988) was the best LA novel of the past 25 years (this well before the Hollywood movie came out). I was mostly serious, but I further meant to point out that some of the talent from poor and working class communities was finding media other than fiction writing to express themselves. On television, David Simon’s The Wire (2002-2008) depicts inner city turmoil as well as anything in print. But the proliferation of new media hardly suffices to explain the fact that we recently halfway emerged from the Great Recession (most poor and working class Americans have not) without a Grapes of Wrath (1934), or Waiting for Nothing (1935), Tom Kromer’s little-known, but piercing [End Page 6] first person novel of Depression-era vagrancy. When I want to...

Before Harriet Blogged: Notes on Girls with Notebooks

Before Harriet BloggedNotes on Girls with Notebooks Bonnie J. Morris (bio) She ran into her room and flung herself on the bed. She lay quietly for a minute looking reverently at her notebook and then opened it . . . there was her handwriting, reassuring if not beautiful. She grabbed up the pen and felt the mercy of her thoughts coming quickly, zooming through her head out the pen onto the paper. What a relief, she thought to herself. —Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy She dug into her bag, drew out her notebook, scribbled something, and tucked the pen in her hair. . . . Was it being a girl, Suzie wondered, that made this idea so difficult? A girl was really at the mercy of other people's thoughts, wasn't she? —Hope Campbell, Why Not Join the Giraffes? For many young girls, keeping a journal or diary is an important rite of passage: a statement of private identity, a narrative of self-importance, and (often) a transgressive act of describing intimate truths shielded from parents and peers. Private writing is also a privileged activity in a world where literacy and access to free time and writing materials are unavailable to millions of girls and women. Ironically, the hours or even years invested in journal writing by girls with such opportunity may end up in ashes: the deliberate burning or shredding of adolescent pages marks a separation from the earlier, embarrassed self. Such erasure also shields, from a parent or friend's prying eyes, observations that revealed forbidden truths. While Internet blogging has exacerbated all these factors, from complications of access to technology to panic over an intimate blog "gone viral," in this essay I am primarily interested in old-fashioned writing by hand; pen on paper. I was a girl with a journal; I remain interested to this day in other girls with [End Page 47] journals and how they used self-expression in navigating the path to womanhood and a writing life. Women who like to scrawl by hand in journals are a uniquely modern clan, a tribe that would be unrecognizable to our Paleolithic stone-age ancestors. Instead of prioritizing sheer survival against the elements, we place finding time to write at the top of our agenda. We prefer gifts of pens and paper to milk and honey or the fat of the lamb. Our cave-dwelling ancestors' bodies were oriented to absolute basics: hunting, gathering, feeding, reproducing, and staying warm; yet we turn down social invitations of food, alcohol, and even sexual companionship in order to spend nights alone, in a cold apartment, narrating life into a bound volume. How does any woman dare to write her life down? How does that start? Writing is, after all, a relationship. If keeping a journal marks one as an antisocial oddity, how much more so when one is female, expected to be available to others, always sharing, other-directed, keeping nothing back. Too much thinking has always been jeered as unfeminine: witness the centuries of cruel jokes depicting brainy girls as ugly, unlikely to marry. Thinking is masculine; caring for others, feminine. Even a progressive writer like John Steinbeck used this gender binary in The Grapes of Wrath, when the earth mother Ma Joad famously intoned, "Woman got all her life in her arms. Man got it all in his head." History books rarely acknowledge the personal, reflective writings and diaries left by women. Instead, we usually learn about great men, and their ideas, until we think that only men made history. My job as a women's history professor is to unlock the female past; to help students believe it could be women who drew on the cave walls at Knossos. But these students arrive in my classroom only after a lifetime of learning that important men, generals and clergy and politicians, are the ones who seized leadership and who wrote in public places. The inner visions of these few men ("Man got it all in his head"), shared with the world, created the rules and revolutions for Western culture. Moses held up his chiseled Ten Commandments, and Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to a church door. Acknowledging that...

Steinbeck's Migrants: Families on the Move and the Politics of Resource Management

This essay departs from recent work on John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath—which has focused largely on its problematic racial politics—by framing the text's portrayal of migrancy around the question of state governance. Steinbeck's novel and The Harvest Gypsies, its nonfiction predecessor, refigure vagrancy into a fantasy involving a mobile class of workers. In doing so, Steinbeck offers an explicit roadmap for a government desperate to move families across the country to where their labor is needed. Ultimately, this reading puts the novel into dialogue with state policies that extend beyond New Deal era.