Steinbeck's To a God Unknown includes a provocative passage in which the “brain of the world” is imagined sitting on a high peak overlooking valleys filled with farms and houses. In this article, ...Lowell Wyse builds upon this image to analyze an underappreciated aspect of Steinbeck's environmental imagination: spatiality and geography. Through an examination of scenes in To a God Unknown and East of Eden, this article shows how an interpretive focus on the geographical construct of the watershed highlights the author's understanding of spatiality as a key component of a more holistic approach to representing place. In addition to placing these novels within the Salinas Watershed, Steinbeck portrays human settlement there as both an ongoing environmental negotiation and a set of spatial practices revolving around the crucial problem of water access. From cartographical and historical perspectives to headwaters and dowsing rods, Steinbeck creates a sense of place as geographically connected and dynamically alive, with water as the unifying element.
The aim of this paper is to reassess John Steinbeck’s presence and significance within American modernism by advancing a myth-critical reading of his early novel “To a God Unknown” (1933). ...Considering the interplay between this novel and the precedent literary tradition and other contextual aspects that might have influenced Steinbeck’s text, this study explores Steinbeck’s often disregarded novel as an eloquent demonstration of the malleability of myths characteristic of Anglo-American modernism. Taking myth-ritualism—the most prominent approach to myth at the time—as a critical prism to reappraise Steinbeck’s own reshaping of modernist aesthetics, this article examines recurrent frustrated and misguided ritual patterns along with the rewriting of flouted mythical motifs as a series of aesthetic choices that give shape and meaning to a state of stagnation common to the post-war American literary landscapes, but now exacerbated as it has finally spread, as a plague of perverse remythologization, to the Eden of the West.
“Steinbeck Country” is an intriguing and alluring space as drawn in John Steinbeck's California works. The landscape and the characters who inhabit it are often simultaneously sketched with sharp ...realism yet imbued with mythic, fantastical qualities that interject complex dimensions into his stories. This dichotomy between characters' perceptions of the landscape and its actuality is quite apparent in some of Steinbeck's earliest works, such as To a God Unknown and The Pastures of Heaven, and it continues to be a significant strand in his best known and later work including Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden. This article explores how both To A God Unknown and The Pastures of Heaven are early examples in Steinbeck's career of unique interactions between people and the places they have lived, currently live, or dream to live in. Apparent in the two works is a tremendous disconnect between what haunted, aching, lonely, driven people think the landscape will offer them and what it actually has to offer them. The drama resulting from that disconnect is a central feature of Steinbeck country. While Steinbeck's descriptions of the California valleys are evocative and idyllic, more often than not, the lives of the characters who are all placed in and defined by these landscapes are haunted and vexed. Characters are compulsively driven by intense longings, unsuccessfully searching to fill voids and ameliorate their lives by drinking deeply of the riches they misperceive the landscape has to freely offer.
From Self to World Reis, Ashley E.
The Steinbeck review,
06/2015, Letnik:
12, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article historicizes John Steinbeck's ecological consciousness, providing a detailed account of the history and philosophy of ecology in order to present a picture of the field at the particular ...moment in which Steinbeck encountered and internalized it. An explication of the ecological paradigm that reigned in Steinbeck's day advances the article's overall argument that Steinbeck's early works are informed by holistic ecology, as is evident in both their content and form. Steinbeck's first novel, To a God Unknown, exemplifies Steinbeck's holistic content, while the short story sequence, The Pastures of Heaven, illustrates his holistic form. Furthermore, Grapes of Wrath's ecological approach extends to both the novel's content and form. An assessment of these texts calls attention to Steinbeck's advancement of his own ecological ethic, and thus positions him not only as Aldo Leopold's contemporary but as an individual grappling with a similar interest in extending ethics to reach beyond the relation of individuals to other individuals and society, but to the land as well.
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