Social class control and domination in America: A critical revisitation of the Great Depression as lived by Americans, through the novel The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck

Author(s):  
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2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 17-32
Author(s):  
Konul Khalilova ◽  
Irina Orujova

The current article involves the issues of losses, gains, or survivals contributing to literature in the process of translation. It represents a thorough study based on the novel “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck from English and, respectively, its translation into Azerbaijani by Ulfet Kurchayli. It investigates the problematic areas or challenges emerging from the source-text discrepancies. Furthermore, this article also concentrates on the issue of cultural non-equivalence or the losses occurring in translating English literary texts into Azerbaijani. The paper identifies the translation techniques adopted by the translator of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Adopting certain techniques rather than others has led to many losses on different levels. The translator’s important role as a cultural insider is also emphasized. The wide gap, distance, or the differences between the cultures, languages, and thought patterns of the English and Azerbaijani language speakers are the main factors resulting in various losses in the process of translation. Coping with these extra-linguistic constraints is harder than the linguistic ones as the translator has no choice in the given situations, deleting these elements from the TT or replacing them with elements that do not fit the context. This article aims at determining translation losses and gains, defining ways that the translator employs for compensating losses, through the analysis of John Steinbeck’s style in The Grapes of Wrath. The article concludes that there are some situations where the translation of a certain text from the SL into the TL embraces alteration in the whole informational content of the text, in the form of expressions or words.


2019 ◽  
pp. 79-94
Author(s):  
Saul Levmore

John Dos Passos’ The Big Money (1936) is hardly the only important American work to see greed as a cause of the stock market crash and then the Great Depression. It is packed with the problem of distinguishing greed from ambition, and it raises the question of the right social response to unattractive impulses. Prior to losing his idealistic fervor, or exchanging it for conservative passion, Dos Passos freely associated ambition with corruption, and acquisitiveness with antisocial self-interest. His deployment and biographical sketches of industrialists and other notable Americans suggest the difficulty of distinguishing avarice from ambition. Dos Passos’ treatment of ambition presupposes an economy where one person’s gain is at the expense of another; artistic accomplishment is, however, freed from this assumption. The novel speaks more to individual excesses than to their regulation, but it offers an opportunity to think about both.


2018 ◽  
Vol 216 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-108
Author(s):  
Assist. Instr. Ansam Muthanna

      John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath(1939) exposes the desperate conditions that surrounded the migratory farm families in America during the year of the Great Depression from the Naturalistic point of view. It combines his adoration of the land and his simple hatred of the corruption resulting from Materialism and his faith in common to overcome his hostile environment. It attempts to present the problem of the workers of the lower classes, and exposes the unusual family, conditions under which the Joads, the migratory farm family, was forced to live during these years. The progress the government intended to spread on the Oklahoma fields and ranches sheltered families a part and reduced the migrants to beggars suffering from deprivation and hunger. His California novels attack the counterfeited image of paradise that people held when they set their migration to California.


2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 16
Author(s):  
Fuad Hasyim

This article is an attempt to study Steinbeck’s vision of the American system of capitalism during 1930’s as causing the greatest economic crisis in American history. The study particularly observes the growth of materialistic values in this era. The main discussion concerns the dramatic journey of Joad’s family toward California as reflected in The Grapes of Wrath.With an interdisciplinary approach, the study examines the novel to comprehend the author’s view about his social phenomena. This is a kind of qualitative research in which the researcher applied library research on The Grapes of Wrath. The data gathered from bibliographical sources was analyzed and written descriptively to describe the seamy side of capitalism in America.The result of this research shows that material success is not the human’s only orientation in his life. The great depression and tragic life of Oklahoma tenant farmers were viewed by the author as due to the impact of uncontrolled American Capitalism in 1930’s. The seamy sides of American Capitalism such as greed, selfishness, corruption, and consumptive behavior, etc. have been described by the author as source of the extensive destruction among American people.Keywords: capitalism, the great depression, materialism, dehumanization.


Author(s):  
John Marsh

The Emotional Life of the Great Depression documents how Americans responded emotionally to the crisis of the Great Depression. Unlike most books about the 1930s, which focus almost exclusively on the despair of the American people during the decade, The Emotional Life of the Great Depression explores the 1930s through other, equally essential emotions: righteousness, panic, fear, awe, love, and hope. In expanding the canon of Great Depression emotions, the book draws on an eclectic archive of sources, including the ravings of a would-be presidential assassin, stock market investment handbooks, a Cleveland serial murder case, Jesse Owens’s record-setting long jump at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, King Edward VIII’s abdication from his throne to marry a twice-divorced American woman, and the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. In concert with these, it offers new readings of the imaginative literature of the period, from obscure Christian apocalyptic novels and H.P. Lovecraft short stories to classics such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Richard Wright’s Native Son. The upshot is a new take on the Great Depression, one that emphasizes its major events (the stock market crash, unemployment, the passage of the Social Security Act) but also, and perhaps even more so, its sensibilities, its structures of feeling.


2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 394-410
Author(s):  
Brian Donovan

Beginning in the early 1930s, US citizens made a concerted effort to ban lawsuits for breach of promise, seduction, criminal conversation, and alienation of affection. By 1940, ten states had outlawed so-called heart balm torts. Yet there is no empirical evidence that rates of heart balm lawsuits were increasing. This article analyzes 1930s media representations to show how the movement against heart balm grew from “tort tales” about allegedly outrageous lawsuits. Heart balm narratives drew from stylized representations of “gold diggers” found in popular culture, and they reflected divisions around gender and social class exacerbated by the Great Depression.


PMLA ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 296-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lisca

When The Grapes of Wrath was published in April of 1939 there was little likelihood of its being accepted and evaluated as a piece of fiction. Because of its nominal subject, it was too readily confused with such high-class reporting as Ruth McKenny's Industrial Valley, the WPA collection of case histories called These Are Our Lives, and Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor's An American Exodus. The merits of The Grapes of Wrath were debated as social documentation rather than fiction. In addition to incurring the disadvantages of its historical position, coming as a kind of climax to the literature of the Great Depression, Steinbeck's novel also suffered from the perennial vulnerability of all social fiction to an attack on its facts and intentions.


2011 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 579-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather D. Curtis

Near the beginning of his classic depression-era novel, The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck introduces the Reverend Jim Casy, a “Burning Busher” who “used to . . . get the people jumpin' an' talking' in tongues, an' glory-shoutin' till they just fell down and passed out.” But now Casy has given up preaching. “The sperit ain't in the people much no more;” Casy tells his friend Tom Joad, “and worse'n that, the sperit ain't in me no more.” Throughout the novel, Steinbeck underscores the crisis of religious meaning in the face of financial catastrophes confronting families like the Joads—share croppers and over-extended farmers who were forced off their land in dustbowl states such as Oklahoma, traveled west seeking work and better wages in California, only to find themselves struggling to stave off starvation, disease, and despair in crowded makeshift or government camps where they encountered sharp-tongued, fire-baptized believers like Steinbeck's character Lisbeth Sandry, a “deep-down Jesus-lover” who accused them of wickedness and warned that God was watching and smoking out sinners who took pleasure in play acting, devil-dancing, and other “hell-burning” behaviors.


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