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This article explores John Steinbeck's Vietnam War journalism as a way of understanding how hawks—those who favor military intervention—read the world with what affect theorists would call a "strong theory" of aggression. I argue that hawkish reading weaponizes the rhetorical precepts of synecdoche, taking its premise that a part can represent a whole as a means to escalate and invade. Steinbeck's journalism demonstrates how hawkish reading occurs not only in a hawk's depiction of the enemy abroad, but inevitably becomes a way of depicting protestors at home. What hawkish reading shows is how the hawk is dedicated to maintaining his strong theory of aggression at any cost, even when the hawk's depictions perpetuate cliché, stereotype, and ultimately, demagoguery. To explore texts like Steinbeck's for their hawkish reading is to better understand not only how the hawk uses facile language to create intense attachments, but also to better understand how the hawk's language creates dissensus at home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to scrutinize the lesser-known journalist identity of John Steinbeck (1902-1968), who has a global reputation as a novelist. Before producing his works including the Great Depression novels that led him to fame, Steinbeck was among the prominent representatives of the literary reportage genre, as he was worked as a reporter for various newspapers and combined his literary talent with journalistic practice. As a journalist and a writer who managed to touch the lives of ordinary people by getting at the heart of the events and telling unique stories on neglected issues and details, Steinbeck's texts can be considered as an example of unique content production and storytelling, which constitute an alternative for today's standardized news reporting devoid of content. For this purpose, this paper analyses Steinbeck's two works, which foreground his identity as a journalist and are among the outstanding examples of the literary reportage genre: Once There Was a War, in which he narrates the background of World War II, and Travels with Charley: In Search of America, in which he conveys his observations on the United States society. As a result of thematic analysis, it is observed that these texts provide the opportunity to narrate unique life-touching stories based on testimonies and by proceeding with ordinary people and details. In sum, Steinbecks' journalism constitutes the initial examples of many news formats and practices, which have later been defined and promoted as alternative journalism and developed further through communication technologies, and promises a significant potential that can offer solutions to the contemporary issues in journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marine ecologist Edward Flanders Ricketts made three trips in the early 1930s to British Columbia, Canada, before publication in 1939 of his Between Pacific Tides, the classic marine ecology text for the west coast of North America. Between Pacific Tides is a highly influential book, widely read by marine ecology students and researchers working in the intertidal zone. These trips were to the inner coast and sheltered waters of the region, where he sampled marine and estuarine habitats. Explored in this paper are details of Ricketts's British Columbia inner coast work, including comments on collection records, collection site locations and influence of survey results, topics that are new to the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the intersection of science and literary expression in Californian literature. It aims to analyze a current in said literature characterized by the convergence of literature and science. In so doing, the essay probes four thematic layers that play a prominent role in Californian environmental literature: 1) ecology and Darwinian science, 2) the holistic approach to science, 3) the geological imagination, 4) and imagined worlds in ecological science fiction. Investigating literary works spanning from the late 19th century to the early 21st century, the essay addresses authors such as John Muir, Mary Austin, Robinson Jeffers and John Steinbeck, each of whom incorporated science into their imaginative writing. In addition to these quintessential Californian authors, the essay also probes texts by writers who experienced the dramatic degradation of the California environment in the 1960s and was further aggravated by climate change at the turn of the century. These writers include Gary Snyder, Ernest Callenbach, Ursula Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson. The essay identifies a distinctive and coherent thread that runs through the texts under scrutiny, one characterized by a critical and skeptical attitude to fragmented science and its ambition to control rather than apprehend the natural world. In contrast, the writers draw from the inclusive and holistic approach applied by Charles Darwin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the summer of 1936, the novelist John Steinbeck was hired by the newspaper The San Francisco News to cover the phenomenon of the migrants that crowded the roadsides of California and the United States in the aftermath of the dust bowls and the 1929 crisis. As a result of the field trip, Steinbeck wrote seven articles that were published in October 1936 and called "The harvest gypsies". These texts have great documental value regarding the social effects of the economic recession and, this is our argument, they play a fundamental role in the change of perspective in Steinbeck's literature, making it more politically engaged and aesthetically realistic. This article aims at understanding how the summer of 1936 altered Steinbeck's critical perception over the American reality, underscoring the fact that migrants were pivotal in such process, since they uncovered the historical kinship between the workers and the old rural middle classes to which the writer belonged. This discovery enhanced the democratic claims of his literature, which peaked in the greatest novel about the Great Depression: 1939's The grapes of wrath. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins with the discovery in a Wellcome Library war psychiatry archive of a carbon copy of one of John Steinbeck's 1943 dispatches to the New York Tribune from the Italian front. The article examines Steinbeck's dispatch in relation to documents in the military psychiatry archive, to Steinbeck's other war dispatches published in 1958 as the collection Once There Was a War, and to the reception of his propagandistic novel The Moon Is Down in order to show that Steinbeck's archived piece (infused as it is with the conflicted discourses of war psychiatry) constructs soldiers' responses to war violence as beset by paradox-- as normal as childbirth yet " beyond bearing." I use this strange juxtaposition of documents (postmodern dispatch and official reports and memoranda) to reflect on the archive as an accidentalanthology that allows us the opportunity to read disparate texts in relation to one another and to see sociocultural phenomena in a new light, in this case both the trajectory of Steinbeck's writing career and contemporary representations of war trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four and other dystopian classics have risen in response to the audacious attempts of President Donald Trump to manipulate public opinion by circulating 'alternative facts' throughout the presidential campaign and since his November 2016 election victory. Various statements by Trump and his advisors that exemplify what has come to be known as the 'post-factual world' account for the meteoric rise and final breakthrough of Nineteen Eighty-Four to the top of the bestseller lists in spring 2017. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary critique is presented for the 20th-century American novel "The Grapes of Wrath," by John Steinbeck, focusing on its social call for economic reform within the U.S. agriculture sector during the New Deal era. Topics addressed include the narrative's portrayal of the migrant farmworker, its negative depiction of social oppression, and the landowner-worker relationship.

The Romanian readership became acquainted with John Steinbeck and his work in the communist years, when his writings have been championed mainly according to the theme of social injustice and protest against capitalism. Fortunately, to this day, critical interest in 'Steinbeck literature' has not faded away, and new translations from the American author continue to reach Romanian readers. The aim of this paper is to explore the extent to which his reputation and work have been reassessed over the two decades of critical reception in post-communist Romania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The polarities of the Cold War impelled many intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic to take sides either with capitalism or communism. Both Jean-Paul Sartre and John Steinbeck famously attempted to respond to this ideological choice and would differ in their political leanings: Sartre was an outspoken critic of American capitalist hegemony, whereas Steinbeck became an avid opponent of the communist bloc. They nonetheless shared a dedication to engaging with the social issues of their time, becoming arguably the pre-eminent proletarian writers of the period and eventual Nobel Prize winners. Sartre believed Steinbeck to be 'the most rebellious, perhaps' of American writers, whilst Steinbeck so admired the French intellectual scene typified by Sartre that he spent nearly a year in Paris writing for Le Figaro. Their pivotal promotion of individual freedom may have nudged them towards both ends of the political spectrum respectively; yet their emphasis on the changeability of human existence constantly destabilized any position they approached. In this article I argue for a productive return to their writing in order to underline the alternations both encounter when seeking to put the libertarian ideal of individuality into practice. In their novels L'Âge de raison (1945) and East of Eden (1952), as well as in their journals, we can observe how their mutual emphasis on man's indeterminism as an autonomous subject inevitably dissolves the foundation of any normative political ethos. As such, it is crucial to reiterate that their engagement with the post-war period in fact deeply complicates the drive for totalization and systemization implied in the strict allegiances of the Cold War political terrain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism is presented of the novel "East of Eden" by John Steinbeck. It explores the masculine aspects of the character Cathy and her rejection of motherhood and marriage. Emphasis is given to topics such as heteronormative ideals, success in the male sphere of society, and traditional female roles.