This thesis explores the relationship between differing interpretation of the California Dream and the narrative strategies through while [sic] they are expressed in three California labor novels during three different decades of California literature.

In this project an educational DVD about the life and writing styles of John Steinbeck was developed for use in high school freshman classrooms at Yucaipa High School. Additional activities to stimulate students' writing and composition in the style of Steinbeck were created to match educational theory and state standards.

This dissertation examines dog and idiot tropes—and, specifically, the conflation thereof—in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Or The Evening Redness in the West (1985). In addition to illustrating the key roles the idiot/dog figure plays in canonical works of twentieth-century U.S. fiction, it argues that this conflation is too often presumed to signify denigration (i.e. a social, political, and ethical exclusion) and degeneration (i.e. a biological threat). Around the turn of the century, the idiot/dog emerges as an aesthetic figure in conjunction with contemporaneous practices of dog breeding and eugenics, as well as co-extensive discourses of national progress and racial purity. In this context, literary idiot/dogs can be read as enciphering a violent historical subtext. Yet, rather than simply condemn this figure as a dehumanizing stereotype, this dissertation challenges such a reductive approach on the grounds that it risks reproducing a hermeneutic that is both ableist and speciesist. A new approach is proposed: reading for the tropological confusion of idiocy and caninity and the destabilizing affective and epistemological effects this poses for liberal subjectivity. Reading for tropological confusion in the fictions of Faulkner, Steinbeck, and McCarthy not only develops new interpretations of three canonical works; it unlocks the idiot/dog figure as a site of textual excess. In so doing, this dissertation makes original contributions to twentieth-century U.S. fiction scholarship, Disability Studies, Animal Studies, and biopolitical theory. The idiot/dog figure’s in/determination—a paradoxical embodiment of humanized canine animality and animalized human mental disability—catalyzes hermeneutic and affective uncertainties. Ultimately, both impinge upon questions of readers’ own abilities to: (i) fully parse the fictions idiot/dogs appear in, and (ii) self-reflexively understand themselves as autonomous, human(e) subjects. Each chapter carefully elaborates this figure’s centrality to the textual operations of, respectively, The Sound and the Fury, Of Mice and Men, and Blood Meridian in terms of their narrative and meta-narrative dimensions; this reveals under-examined continuities. By arguing for idiot/dogs’ disruptive potentials (i.e. affective, epistemological, and ethical), this dissertation bridges and extends previous Disability Studies and Animal Studies interventions that link literary representations to social and material contexts. Also, it further intervenes in these subfields by elaborating the biopolitical reasons for and ramifications of the idiot/dog figure’s emergence in twentieth-century Anglo-American fiction. Each chapter outlines how and why idiot/dog figures constitute a means for harmonizing readers’ experiences, thoughts, desires, and feelings with the normative U.S. social and symbolic order—a national order that hinges on recognitions and denials of human subjectivity, as well as on the production of subjectivity in which fiction is implicated. Ultimately, by closely analyzing literary idiot/dog figures, this dissertation contributes a biopolitical critique of the ontological production and governability of readerly subjects themselves. / Graduate / 2021-09-05

This essay demonstrates how three popular writers of the twentieth century have created novels that contain echoes of Eliot's poem. They are F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), and John Steinbeck's To a God Unknown (1933). I chose these particular novels because they exemplify widely different and distinctive echoes of the poem. Fitzgerald's use of waste land imagery is readily perceptible the most effective in defining and summing up the temper of the Jazz Age in America. Hemingway's borrowing lies principally in parallel characterization (Jake Barnes as he Fisher King is the outstanding example) and in depicting a morally and spiritually bankrupt world by showing that a satisfactory sexual relationship between man and woman is impossible. Steinbeck's borrowing is unique. HIs novel not only contains the Fisher King figure, desert land imagery, water motif, and the quest theme, but his protagonist, Joseph Wayne, like Eliot's Fisher King-Tiresias protagonist, is able to metamorphose from one "personage" into another. Steinbeck's borrowings are not used by him for the purpose of depicting the world of the Twenties, or any era. He may have done no more than build upon a piece of literature from the immediate past as Eliot had done from the more remote past when he created The Waste Land. There is also a possibility that Steinbeck disagrees with some of Eliot's philosophical ideas and playfully chides the poet for harboring them. In showing the nfluence of the poem on three important American novelists, perhaps this essay will disprove Karl Shapiro's statement that "at no point in the career of Eliot has there been the slightest indication of literary following,"5 and will furnish proof that Robert E. Knoll's statement regarding the influence of The Waste Land is a valid one: What The Rape of the Lock was to the Augustans and Tintern Abbey to the Romantics, The Waste Land has become to the Moderns, It is inescapable.6

The objective of this thesis is to explore how American authors represented poverty across different states during the Depression Era. I have chosen to review social reform author John Steinbeck, and proletariat authors, Michael Gold, Meridel Le Sueur, and William Attaway. Before addressing the issues presented in the data collection tools (novels): The Grapes of Wrath, Jews Without Money, The Girl, and Blood on the Forge, I reviewed the fundamentals of the events leading up to the crash of the stock market, which spiraled the United States and the world at large in the greatest Depression ever known. In this thesis, I have also outlined a summary of the novels for the benefit of readers who may not have had the opportunity to read them. I have applied a Marxist literary critical analysis to the preceding novels highlighting three overarching concepts of the theory: economic power, materialism versus spirituality, and class conflict. Evolving from these concepts are the key tenets of Marxism: base, superstructure, hegemony, commodification, class conflict, and false consciousness. In the literary critical analysis, I applied these key tenets to the plot of each novel in order to underscore the ideologies of Marxist theorists with regards to the existence of class divisions and how this division creates class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariats.

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