Book contents
- Reclaiming John Steinbeck
- Reclaiming John Steinbeck
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Loving and Hating Steinbeck
- Chapter 1 Short Stories in School and Lab: “Tularecito” and “The Snake”
- Chapter 2 Drought, Climate, and Race in the West: To a God Unknown
- Chapter 3 Race and Revision: “The Vigilante” and “Johnny Bear”
- Chapter 4 Becoming Animal: Theories of Mind in The Red Pony
- Chapter 5 What Is It Like to Be a Plant? “The Chrysanthemums” and “The White Quail”
- Chapter 6 On Not Being a Modernist: Disability and Performance in Of Mice and Men
- Chapter 7 Emergence and Failure: The Middleness of The Grapes of Wrath
- Chapter 8 Borderlands: Extinction and the New World Outlook in Sea of Cortez
- Chapter 9 Mexican Revolutions: The Forgotten Village, The Pearl, and the Global South
- Epilogue The Aftertaste of Cannery Row
- Notes
- Index
Chapter 1 - Short Stories in School and Lab: “Tularecito” and “The Snake”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2021
- Reclaiming John Steinbeck
- Reclaiming John Steinbeck
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Loving and Hating Steinbeck
- Chapter 1 Short Stories in School and Lab: “Tularecito” and “The Snake”
- Chapter 2 Drought, Climate, and Race in the West: To a God Unknown
- Chapter 3 Race and Revision: “The Vigilante” and “Johnny Bear”
- Chapter 4 Becoming Animal: Theories of Mind in The Red Pony
- Chapter 5 What Is It Like to Be a Plant? “The Chrysanthemums” and “The White Quail”
- Chapter 6 On Not Being a Modernist: Disability and Performance in Of Mice and Men
- Chapter 7 Emergence and Failure: The Middleness of The Grapes of Wrath
- Chapter 8 Borderlands: Extinction and the New World Outlook in Sea of Cortez
- Chapter 9 Mexican Revolutions: The Forgotten Village, The Pearl, and the Global South
- Epilogue The Aftertaste of Cannery Row
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Steinbeck received much of his early training in creative writing classes at Stanford University. Focusing on Steinbeck’s short story cycle, The Pastures of Heaven, this chapter explores Steinbeck’s education in writing--and his resistance to many of its principles--as it relates to his understanding of the colonial history of the American West. The unstable mixture of realist and fantastic forms, particularly as they relate to the construction of literary character, here encapsulates an ambivalent resonse to the haunting lagacies of slavery and race in the California land. The second part of the chapter, on the story “The Snake,” traces another aspect of Steinbeck’s education--this time in the scientific laboratory--to understand an approach to gender more complex than critics would admit. The experiment with narrative point of view uncovers sexist ideologies in the purportedly objective act of scientific observation, thus bringing attention to the process of attention itself.
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- Reclaiming John SteinbeckWriting for the Future of Humanity, pp. 18 - 35Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021