7/11/2016

John Steinbeck the grapes of wrath

The Great depression

-Unprecedented, severe and long
-Causes:
Stockmarket crash in 1929
5000 banks failed, bankrupted no bail out (rescate)
Unemployment ( in cities as Detroit or Chicago that reached up
upon 50%), foreclosures (evictions)
Drought: dust bowl (sequia en el centro de america, no crops, no
profits, loss of lands by the banks)
Migrants to California (highway 66, crosses nation from coast to coast,
journey at novel)
Weak response to New Deal reforms (F. Roosevelt) very slowly (did
not help America overcome the depression fast)
Government 3 turns (unique) very inspirational, spirit of endurance
New Deal: Relief, recovery, reform
-Housing for migrant workers, urban communities
-Home loans
-Manual jobs: road construction, reforestation
-Jobs for writers and visual artists:
State guidebooks, recording for oral histories (former slaves,
inmigrants) collection of slaves narratives convained testimony of
former slaves
Public art, photography projects (documentation of things, describe
struggles of Americans, document reality, documentary form )
Examples: Dorothea Lange (migrant worker, 1936) Ben Shahn
(resettlement administration clients) Last scene novel , main
character feeds someone else (inspired by photograph)
Public art: Murals (offer work to the people, put up in institutional
buildings, remembrance of soviet art)
Portrait of Americans in very industrial way, working very hard ,
spirit government wanted to encourage people)
Literary response to the Great Depression
(20s in modernism , landmarks no portraying reality as it is in a
very stylish way )
Shift to realism
Socially-conscious writing (J. Steinbeick, emblem)
Evidence of the importance of documentary form , depiction of
reality ( t grapes of Wrath very good example)
Documenting the every day lives an struggle of common Americans
Previous writers in the realist tradition: Sister Carrie, 1990 (Th.
Dreisser) Mc Teague (

Author
From Salinas, California , his background is Irish and German
(ancestry) he grew up in a modest family with a happy childhood.
He worked picking fruit in an early age with the rancher and
agricultural workers. He studied in Stanford but he dropped out .
Freelance worker in NY unsuccessful but then back in California. He
joined the League of American Writers (1935) socialist and left
inclinations (novel , strikes )
Tortilla Flat (1935) first successful novel , Of mice and Men (1937)
Grapes of Wrath (1939) best selling book controversial and Pulitzer.
He combined writing with journalism and also war correspondent in
WWII and Vietnam work. Nobel prize in 1962 (Faulkner, Hemingway,
first one was Sinclair Lewis. Toni Morrison, latest Bob Dylan)
http://www.biography.com/people/john-steinbeck-9493358
The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
-Best-seller, Pulitzer prize, and film version next year (middle crisis)
-Big social impact (Uncles Tom Cabin, big social impact also, first
civil war testimony about slavery, people dehumanized, strong
empathy, forbidden in south)
-Controversy (political debate of displaced people)
-Universal appeal despite social protest fiction(
-Joads have a collective role:
Okis, migrant workers, the eternal immigrant, DPs (displaced
people), jews, Israelites (biblical, Plymouth Plantation, exodus,
puritans)
-Themes:
Community, brotherhood, survival (people helping each other to
survive, brotherhood of man)
Human endurance, tenacity, recielance
Individuals struggle with natural and social forces (example of
naturalism, more intense type of realism, conflict between
individual, smallness individual in natural and social environment)
Banks represented abstract kind of force, monsters, unnamed
-Familiarity
Worked on farms and ranches as a boy
Before writing the novelJournalism Harvest Gypsies series of
articles (three) for the San Francisco News
Research in fieldtrips, friend of camp manager
-Novels structure
a) Drought and dispossession (1-11)
b) The Journey (12-18)
c) Arrival and life in California (19-30)
(quotation chapter 12, Journal in 66 66 is the path [] 66 is the
mother road, the road of light.
-Style fiction+ documentary
Hybrid texts than combines fictional chapters and expository
chapters (alternating)
Two kinds of chapters:
Fictional (18 and 30) + documentary (interchapters)

John dos Passos U.S.A trilogy

Documentary chapters:
Purposereflect reality, give readers the larger picture of things
document historical, sociological etc. issues. Provide readers info.
Could be boring if it was not inserted in fictional characters .
Generalized characters
Well integrated blend well with one set of chapters and the other
Language, same narrator , style of narrator king Johns bible
-influence bible
syntax rhythm tone (chapter 1)
allusions parallelisms
Title The Battle Hymn of the republic Book of Revelation (refers
wrath of God)
The Joads the Israelites in exodus(oppression of the Egyptians vs.
oppression of the banks) the plagues of Egypt , cross the desert,
wilderness hardship on their way, they arrive land promised (knaan,
first see it from a high place California from a high place,
antagonism kananans and Californians ) (12 joads , 12 tribes of
Israel ) timelessness universality, connection to human experience ,
makes them more human , mythic historical significance not only
destitute oki family , their importance is greater
Rose of Sharon, final scene
-some religious allusions
And the angel thrust[]winepress of the wrath of God (Book of
Revelation, coming of Apocalypse)
In the souls of people the grapes[] for the vintage
(interchapter)
I am the Rose of [] the song of Solomon ( virgin and Christ aura
around her)