Engl 120

Spring 2013

Historicizing Grapes: Texts and Contexts

For the final course project, you’ll write your own new historicist analysis of The Grapes of Wrath by

a)  focusing on a discourse that informs both the novel and another text—either a text that is contemporary to the novel (more or less) or one that revisits the discourse from some future moment—and by

b)  framing a thesis about what the novel contributes to that discourse, especially in light of (or in relation to) the contribution of the complementary text.

Remember that you’re considering here the ways in which a literary text is an embedded participant in history—the contributions it makes to what and how people knew or believed about their own historical moment, along with its continuing contribution to our own understanding of that historical moment. That is, you’re not attempting to recover some empirical “truth” about 1930s America against which you will compare the novel in order to determine its historical “veracity”; rather, you're considering the novel’s relationship to the discourses that circulated at the time and its participation in the construction of one such discourse. A contemporary newspaper account of Pretty Boy Floyd, for instance, doesn’t offer an objective truth about Floyd or about criminality generally during the Depression; rather, the newspaper “constructs” an identity for Floyd (and the “criminal element” more generally) that will have some kind of relationship to the construction of Floyd in The Grapes of Wrath, as well as Tom Joad’s own status as a “criminal.” Both texts can be seen as constructing competing claims about criminality itself—who gets branded as “criminal,” and why? Whose interests are served by such constructions? What competing claims existed at the time? What did The Grapes of Wrath contribute to the discourse of criminality in the United States in 1939?

In completing the Annotated Grapes Project you’ll have identified and invested some thought in another text(s)— one that I suggested or one that you found yourself. I offered my suggested texts together with a possible “discourse” to consider: the discourse of “migrants” or that of “poverty and relief.” (You aren’t bound by my suggestions, however; if you think the suggested text intersects with the novel in some other way, you should feel free to pursue that instead.) And, of course, if you’ve selected a text yourself, you’ll need to determine how, precisely, you see it in conjunction with The Grapes of Wrath. I do, however, expect you to identify some topic—a discourse—about which both The Grapes of Wrath and your second text make claims, either explicitly or implicitly.

To keep the paper from spinning out of control and into sweeping generalizations (which are never terribly enlightening), select one or two specific passages from the novel to examine closely in conjunction with your complementary text(s). Continuing with our example of Pretty Boy Floyd and the discourse of criminality: you might, for instance, consider how Ma Joad talks about the outlaw in chapters 8 and 28 in addition to (in comparison to?) how that newspaper article speaks of him. You might throw in Woody Guthrie’s “Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd” for still another account. You would want to consider how each of these various genres constructs the “truth” of its topic, perhaps with the aid of Rob Pope’s questions from the “Annotated Grapes” handout: what rhetorical and generic strategies does each text draw upon? How does it employ or exploit those strategies? (For instance, we do conventionally think of newspaper accounts as more “objective” than artistic accounts—that is, we would typically privilege the newspaper account as more rigorously investigative than a “subjective” literary account.) How did/do these texts circulate? Who consumes/consumed them, and how?

If you choose a text from a much later historical moment (say, a magazine article that revisits the “Okies” in the 1950s), then your job is a bit more complicated; see below.

Your essay should have a clearly articulated and specific thesis. You remember what a thesis is, right? It’s a claim or statement about your topic, the validity of which is not self-evident. Rather, is must be established and supported by a carefully reasoned argument. A professor of mine in graduate school used to say that a good thesis is narrow in focus, but broad in implications. Keep that advice in mind: make your focus fairly specific, but be sure that you can connect it to the novel and the historical moment in broader ways.

Another important aspect of new historicist approaches is an awareness of the historical “situatedness” of the inquirer. That is, we ourselves come to The Grapes of Wrath and other texts from historical eras other than our own with a host of assumptions and “knowledge” about that era, as well as the ideologies and discourses of our own moment. (Think of Jonathan Dyen.) In the case of America during the Great Depression, of course, The Grapes of Wrath itself played a crucial part in teaching us what we know, or think we know, about the era. That is, if we intuitively sense the “truth” of The Grapes of Wrath, it may because the novel has already had such an enduring impact on our understanding of what the Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the Okie migration to California meant. Choosing a later text, then, will mean considering the extent to which, say, the Okie experience had already been mythologized, thanks in large part to The Grapes of Wrath.

On Thursday, April 25th—earlier if you like—your eighth and last Informal Writing Assignment will be due: some preliminary notes towards the final paper. I’ll post to Moodle some specific questions that will help in your thinking about this final project, and I’ll read and respond to your work as quickly as I can.

Final Project due Thursday, May 2

IMPORTANT ADDITIONAL INSTRUCTIONS! Please be sure your project:
·  appropriately paraphrases, summarizes, and/or quotes from your materials, and includes parenthetical citations according to MLA conventions;
·  includes a complete Works Cited page, correctly formatted using MLA conventions (we’ll spend some time discussing MLA citation conventions in class one day);
·  is formatted according to MLA guidelines for research papers;
·  is proofread for style and usage, syntax, spelling, and punctuation.