The Philosophical Joads

Carpenter, Frederic I.

doi:10.2307/370490

Cited by 5 publications

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“…A full development of these connections might mitigate some of the tension between the perspective on workingclass political culture developed in this paper and recent work on the marginalization of women and racial minorities. These agrarian themes also link this essay to previous contributions in Steinbeck scholarship, notably papers by Carpenter (1941) and Eisinger (1947). Both argued for an agrarian reading of The Grapes of Wrath, though the version of agrarianism they describe would not have obvious links to contemporary feminist or postcolonial thought.…”

Section: Some Preliminariesmentioning

confidence: 82%

Agriculture and working-class political culture: A lesson from The Grapes of Wrath

Thompson

2007

Agric Hum Values

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John SteinbeckÕs 1939 novel can be given a reading that links events and the mentality of characters to mainstream schools of liberal and neo-liberal political theory: libertarianism, egalitarianism, and utilitarianism. Each of these schools is sketched in outline and applied to topics in rural political culture. While it is likely that Steinbeck himself would have identified with an egalitarian or utilitarian view, he resists the temptation to deny his Okie characters an authentic voice that matches none of these schools so well as it articulates an agrarian mentality once associated with Thomas Jefferson and today articulated by Wendell Berry. This reading of The Grapes of Wrath, in turn, can be interpreted as both a rebuke to contemporary social theorists who continue to impose an ill-fitting left-right dichotomy on working class political culture in rural America and as a roadmap suggesting ways that philosophy and rural sociology might engage one another more directly and productively with respect to contemporary rural development and environmental quality issues.

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Section: Some Preliminariesmentioning

confidence: 82%

Agriculture and working-class political culture: A lesson from The Grapes of Wrath

Thompson

2007

Agric Hum Values

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“…While the novel may be read as an example of Emersonian idealism in the midst of literary naturalism, a style that, as Charles Walcutt has described one defining stream of naturalism, “nourishes idealism, progressivism, and social radicalism,” Steinbeck's anti‐separatist agenda is pursued in decidedly biological terms (vii). Of literary interpreters, Frederic I. Carpenter comes close to identifying the sense of contrast between organic self‐organization, Kauffman's second source of order, and the socialistic path of organization Jim Casy hopes to take. In an examination of the old “I” becoming the new “we,” Carpenter sees a process whereby the “mutually repellent particles of individualism begin to cohere” (319).…”

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confidence: 99%