The Interplay between Place, Culture, and Ideology in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath: A Reading in the light of Cultural Materialism | ||||
| المجلة العلمیة لکلیة الآداب-جامعة أسیوط | ||||
| Article 37, Volume 31, Issue 92, October 2024, Page 1961-1980 PDF (1.05 MB) | ||||
| Document Type: بحوث علمية محکمة | ||||
| DOI: 10.21608/aakj.2024.312119.1842 | ||||
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| Author | ||||
Alia Abbas M. Hassan Mabrouk 
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| Department of English Faculty of Languages and Translation Ahram Canadian University | ||||
| Abstract | ||||
| Cultural materialism questions the modernist claims to timelessness and its tendency to set certain meanings as universal. Dealing with the particularity of incidents, cultural materialism introduces a type of cultural analysis that looks deeply into the worldliness of the lived experience, and the socio-economic and ideological background that has generated a cultural or an aesthetic production. Inspired by Marxism, yet revolting against its deterministic tendency in sociological analysis, cultural materialism practises a genealogical method of cultural analysis that investigates the dialectical interaction between the residual, the emergent, and the dominant in an open-ended manner and away from preconceived lines of inevitability. The aim of the present research is to offer a reading of John Steinbeck’s literary masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath in the light of cultural materialism. Culture, within the framework of the text, is a productive process and a part of the system of signification that codifies the lived experience. The Grapes of Wrath contextualizes the concept of ideology and subjects it to the incessantly changing nature of human community. The cultural materialist reading of the novel depends on Raymond Williams’ seminal books: The Country And The City, Keywords, Culture And Society, and Marxism And Literature. As a cultural product of its specific historicist and ideological moment, the text will be studied on the level of its portrayal of the socio-economic and ideological predicament of the farmers, and on the level of its being a discursive formation and an example of how a cultural materialist analysis should be conducted. | ||||
| Keywords | ||||
| ideology; articulation; residual; emergent; dominant | ||||
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