As a writer who, beginning in the 1930s, gave voice to the ordinary man and woman, Steinbeck came to be the conscience of America. He witnessed and recorded with clarity much of the political and ...social upheaval of the 20th century: the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, Vietnam. Yet his place in the literary canon of American literature has been much debated and often dismissed by academics. Beyond Boundaries challenges that dismissal and replaces it with a fuller, more nuanced and international appreciation of the popular Nobel laureate and his works.
Topics treated in these wide-ranging essays include the historical and literary contexts and the artistic influence of the eminent novelist; the reception and translation of Steinbeck works outside the United States; Steinbeck's worldview, his social vision, and his treatment of poverty, of self, and of patriotism; influence on Native American writers; the centrality of the archetypal feminine throughout his fiction; and the author's lifelong interest in science and philosophy.
Truly international in scope, this timely study reevaluates the enduring and evolving legacy of one of America's most significant writers.
Let the children persuade Heller, Rafael
Phi Delta Kappan,
02/2021, Letnik:
102, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Two decades ago, during a brief stint working in a teacher preparation program, Heller got to know a young man who struck him as an exceptionally promising educator. Tom was a top student in the ...university's English department, a gifted writer, and, according to his supervising instructor at the local high school, far and away the best student teacher she had seen in her 40 years in the classroom. With our glowing recommendations in hand, he soon found a job teaching in a district not far from where he had grown up. Tom's first day of teaching went well enough, but that night he got a call from his principal, who berated him for assigning his students to read John Steinbeck's classic novel Of Mice and Men.
Appearing in John Steinbeck's Cannery Row (1945) and East of Eden (1952) are two memorable Chinese images that always generate conflicting critical comments from scholars. Nearly all the Steinbeck ...critics notice the nature of the bizarre mixture characteristic of the two Chinese images, namely philosopher-grocer and philosopher-servant, but they treat these two mixed Chinese images with different attitudes out of their own respective stances of morality, ethnicity, philosophy, politics, or even personal preferences. Here, Tian examines the Chinese images in Steinbeck's novels.
The concept of Slightly Out of Focus, attributed to the photographer Robert Capa, is a line of research that invites us to delve into icons, such as the photographs “The Falling Soldier” and ...“Crawling through the Water”. Regarding the version presented by proponents of Robert Capa’s work and the results of recent investigations, there are some discrepancies regarding the classification of The Mexican Suitcase II and his photographic style. The conflicts concerning cameras lost negatives, and the effect of blurriness in both icons are coincidences that may form a pattern in the discourse about Robert Capa. This research also analyzes two theses on the biases of press photography and documentary photography. The first thesis considers that in press photography, staging is fraudulent information, but not in documentary photography. The second thesis posits that staging is an unacceptable fraud in both photographic biases. The methodology applied in both theses compares two icons of Robert Capa, considered typical of press photography, with two other icons by photographer Arthur Rothstein, namely, “Cattle Skull” and “Dust Storm”. Rothstein is a reference figure in documentary photography and the 1936 Resettlement Administration program, later known as Farm Security Administration. The press’s reaction to the staging of the photograph Cattle Skull left no doubt about the incompatibility of staging in the context of documentary photography.
READING TO MY MOTHER Theroux, Phyllis
Phi Kappa Phi forum,
04/2022, Letnik:
102, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Flying home to California, she packed up her few belongings and drove to my brothers house on the Monterey Peninsula, where she spent the next few weeks meditating, trying to come to terms with ...reality. At night after supper, it became a new habit for us to sit in the living room while I read aloud from whatever looked interesting - a gossipy Vanity Fair article about a celebrity or a chapter from Look Homeward, Angel. When Dolo came on Friday, my mother placed Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist on. the coffee table - along with a bottle of Scotch. (Refreshments were a big part of this reading program.) " The Alchemist is definitely the right book for Dolo," my mother declared after she had departed.
This essay explores Richard Wright’s Native Son in light of the rhetoric of possession deployed in it. I begin by revisiting Wright’s political ideas with a focus on the theme of possession, thereby ...opening up the possibility to read the novel as Wright’s critique of what C. B. Macpherson calls “possessive individualism,” a conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person and capacities, for which he owes nothing to society. Clarifying how the novel—including its naturalist narrative form—is structured by the theme of dis/possession, I demonstrate that even Bigger’s seemingly existentialist selfhood is also informed by his sense of possession. From this perspective, I argue that the novel’s controversial ending bespeaks Wright’s aspiration to an alternative to capitalist property relations.
This article addresses the sensitive, religious-political issue of the promised land. It discusses this issue from the perspective of the criticism of the promised land in the works of Walter ...Brueggemann in comparison to his artistic source of influence, John Steinbeck. After the systematic analysis of Brueggemann’s criticism of land ideology throughout his work, I elaborate on Steinbeck’s critical attitude to this topic which I offer as Steinbeck’s own alternative criticism. On top of the affirmation that “Steinbeck may have put the issue of the land most eloquently,” as suggested by Brueggemann himself, I propose that Steinbeck (unlike Brueggemann) does not fall into the trap of producing an inverted ideology and offers a balanced and timeless criticism of the promised land issue.
Marisela Connely (coord.), Seguridad humana, medio ambiente y protestas populares en Asia y África del Norte, El Colegio de México, México, 2016, 278 pp.
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