The latest capitalist restructuring has resulted in new conditions of employment, seriously affecting possibilities for people’s self-realization. Women have been hurt the most and face an increasing feminisation of poverty. This paper foregrounds the importance of literary socialisation in preparing young people to accept or reject neoliberal gendered scripts.
The article first outlines the way in which mainstream children's fiction has traditionally sought to address and underrnine the artificiality of oppositional and hierarchical gender paradigms. Pro-ferninist texts that abound in mainstream children's literature have never really extricated themselves from the bonds of gender-related binarisations and hierarchizations because their approach in delineating girl protagonists hasbeen premised primarily upon a mere reverslil of masculine and ferninine defined attributes. By insisting only on the exarnination and reversal of attributes, mainstream children's fiction has fallen short of investigating narrative mechanisms which are essential to the understanding of how subjectivities, regardless of their feminine or masculine inflections, are constituted in the first place. To address this issue, it is argued that children's mainstream literature should embrace such literary devices as metafiction and genre mixing. The article goes on to demonstrate the kind of impact these devices have in challenging and underrnining the socially constructed notions of oppositional and hierarchical gender paradigms on those children who have been subject to traditionalliterary socialization.
In the wake of the so-called postmodernist turn in literary studies and criticism, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath has been subjected to a major interpretative revision that has reoriented the focus solely on the chapters dealing with the Joads while leaving out those that provide a detailed analysis of larger socioeconomic forces at work. The latter are laid out in documentary interchapters that constitute the backbone of dialectical montage, a narrative method used by Steinbeck to create a consciousness-raising novel. Documentary interchapters, as this paper argues, shed light on the integrated forms of systemic exploitation that agricultural workers face in capitalism. Overlooking the significance of documentary interchapters results in a reductive reading of Steinbeck’s classic, which in turn also undermines its consciousness-raising potential in our era.
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