Introduction

American Modernism → aesthetic self-consciousness + formal and thematic innovation

- Problematic of “the real” → find fresh stylistic modes
Country lacked sense of community and shared experience
- Literature emphasis on individual perception and consciousness
Representational convention of the real
- Realism → powerful vehicle of social critique
Literature of socio political commentary and analysis of manners:
- deviate from innovative and erudite expressive forms of Modernism
“Dirty Thirties” → Depression, environmental disaster, rise of totalitarianisms
- Social realists → convery social and economic inequalities of industrialized country
+ destructive exploitation of humans and nature
- Psychological realists: motives and aspirations of characters

Edith Wharton: Roman Fever”

Description of American manners and conventions, affect relationships of upper class in

NY
- Address changing gender roles
- Victorian femininity → womanhood = pure, submissive, home-bound, intellectually
uninterested
- Wharton: comply + resist social expectation
Focus: social inequalities
Psychological Realism
Reveal details of female experience, accent on perception of observers and psychology
- Reveal characters’ feelings and observations to explain their acts
Usually central focalizer, partial observation fills narrative with gaps, ambiguities, ironies
Narrative voice: unreliable narrator, vision incomplete

Short story → in-depth narration

Accent on parts → make meaning from those parts
Free indirect thought → narrator tell own narrative voice what characters are thinking
- Thinking process belongs to characters
- Shifting narrative perspective → direct thought: thinking and linguistic agent the
same
Rewriting of Henry James’ Daisy Miller from female point of view
- Two women characters → Rome separates them from the strict NY social codes
- Exposure to unknown conditions
- Represented outdoors → new roles, “out in the open”
Female characters denied chance to speak because of decorum of social conventions
- Keep inner emotions desires under surface
Dialogue vs focalized free indirect thought → disclose differences MRs Slade vs Mrs
Ansley perceive, think, express
- Not as friendly, public image hide long-kept secrets/resentment
Transgressions challenge accepted/acceptable ideas of womanhood+new perceptions of
women
- Unconventional side of womanhood: Slade’s jealousy of Mrs Ansley
 - Rivalry/competition for best husband-provider
Symbols:
- Central: knitting → metaphor: ways in which history repeats itself + past/present
interwave into single fabric
- Telescope: limited viewpoint, little knowledge of each other, fragmentary/slanted
Not extend narrators access to all characters → Mrs Slade’s perspective = central focalizer
Juxtaposition: mental/factual; psychological/social; private/public
Action and dialogue complement focalization and free indirect thought
Setting: Mussolini’s Rome, ruins of Colosseum → symbolic potential
(competition/combat)
- Presence of the past in the present
- Decadence of western civilization, destruction of sense of origin
- Undermined foundations of two womens’ relationship
Ambiguous ending → transgression of patriarchal models of womanhood

Role of time: past cause for and is the present

Doopelganger device → symmetrical, parallel characters
The letter → misread/unread story of two main characters
Irony: Delphin Slade
Husbands: absent characters → role important
Subtle forms of aggression: blows from Mrs Slade, knitting needles,
- Merciless behaviour activates female agencty

John Steinbeck, “Grapes of Wrath”

Question social and symbolic orders → break with the past, adjust recognizable myths
to make sense of modern times
Sympathy towards destitute and disempowered → socialist inclination
Outcome of a particular moment and space + attack to abuse upon the dispossessed of
Great Depression

Joad family → embody thousands of farmers who abandon farm due to drought
“Dust Bowl” (severe drought + dust storms) + Great Depression →migrate
- Frame: Biblical story of exodus → great hopes of promised land
Journalist style→ documentary format
Interchapters: dramatize social and historical context
The Joads stand for mass migration
Narrative: structural elements to indicate shifts in viewpoints → wide picture
- Main : eyes of characters, characters in detail as individual persons
- interchapters: wider panorama (no characterization)
Migrant workers = victims of progress/mechanization
- Economic strenth of industrialism
- roads/engines = ambivalent role → chance to prosper vs economics that expel them
Myth of the West = land of promise and welfare → find depression in California too
- Appeal reader’s moral sympathy and human kinship + Americanism
- Native air to plight of migrant workers
Rich characterization + complex symbolic system → analyse human behaviour
Cultural, mythical,, philosophical echoes
 - Allusion to old Testament + American substratum
Darwins’s holistic scheme → “the group or phalanx idea” → metaphor for social organization
- Group organisms articulate and behave → ecosystems (collective organization)
- From I to We
- Class communal vs selfish behavior
Melancholy: bond human/earth
- Wastelands → nostalgic sense of loss
Nature: unpredictable and harmful at times → attention to what can be changed
Tribute to the mystic and ritualistic
- Blend social and mystic → last scene controversial
- Some: too sentinel /decontextualized
- Others: call for commitment within community
- Metaphor of ripening fruit:
- The hungry → growing wrath
- In the souls of people grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy
Reorganization of power within the family:
- Dispossession undermines patriarchal authority
- Evolution of gender roles: from secondaty to active outstanding roles
- Ma Joad and Rose of Sharon
- Embodiment of the Great Mother
- Propose non-authoritarian form of family structure
- Ma Joad’s notion: unity and solidarity makes the group survive
- Different generations of women interact
Reversed Exodus (Chapet 28)
- Several discourse of renewal and endurance →interplay realistic +symbolic elements
- Jim Casy =Christ figure → message of tolerance, justice, universal love

Chapter 5: dialogues in direct speech without quotation marks

Villain = modern technology, depicted as living creature
Ways humanity interacts with earth → driver dehumanizes through machine imagery
Sexual and violent diction → operations of the tractor upon the land
Violant appropriation and defense of the land
Little thins support idea of Joad’s abundance
Woman taking over the family → Ma decides spending of money → become head of family
Box-car site, small community, help each other → from particular to general levels of
understanding
Animal imagery related to characters
King James Bible style → simplicity of diction+syntax, repetitions, parallel structures,
polysyndeton
- Ceremonial cadence, authoritative voice → moral center
Ethics of care → suffest humanity will be sustained, combine social+ mystical, politics+myth
Connect women with continuity
Influence of biology on his work
First person of the plural
Vernacular speech
Theatrical, narrative techniques