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Ann Arbor, MI 48106 CONTEXTS OF DEVELOPMENT IN JOHN STEINBECK'S THE JOURNALS OF THE GRACES OF WRATH AND JOURNAL OF A NOVEL DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Mary Alice Dillman, B.A., M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1992 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Elsie J. Alberty Robert B . Bargar Adviser Frank J. Zidonis College of Education& To My Spouse Tom Dillman ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I express sincere appreciation to Dr. Robert B. Bargar for his interest, guidance and insight throughout the research. Gratitude goes also to the other members of my advisory committee, Dr. Elsie J. Alberty and Dr. Frank J. Zidonis, for their support and advice. To my husband, Tom, I offer sincere thanks for his computer expertise and his unshakable faith in me. Thanks needs to go to Mary Jean S. Gamble, Steinbeck Librarian at the City of Salinas, John Steinbeck Library, for her help in locating materials. Also, the librarians at both the Steinbeck Research Center at San Jose State University and the John Steinbeck Special Collections at Stanford University Library assisted me greatly. I am indebted to Mrs. Elaine Steinbeck for her willingness to be interviewed in New York City. VITA 22 June 1930 ................ Born. North Manchester, Indiana 1952 ............. B.A., Manchester College, North Manchester, Indiana 19 84 . M.A., The Ohio State University 1981-Present ................ Part time Instructor of English as a Second Language, Ohio Wesleyan University Ohio Dominican College The Ohio State University 1985-1986 .................. Lecturer. Instituto Internacional of Madrid, Spain 1988-Present ................ Instructor. Ohio Wesleyan University PUBLICATIONS Instruction for LEP Vocational Students for the United States Department of Education, 1987, at The Ohio State University, National Center for Research in Vocational Education, Columbus, Ohio. FIELD OF STUDY Major Field: Education TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION .............................................. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................... iii VITA ............................. _...................... iv TABLE OF CONTENTS......................................... v CHAPTER I: Introduction ................................ 1 Introduction ....................................... 1 Background Rationale for Research Problem ........ 1 Problem Statement ................................ 3 Significance of the Research........................ 4 Research Methodology .............................. 5 Literature Review ................................ 9 CHAPTER II: Research Design ............................ 23 Purpose of R e s e a r c h ................................ 23 Assumptions Guiding the Research and the Analysis . 24 A Discussion of Sources .......................... 25 Research Design .................................. 29 Data Collection................................ 29 Pilot S t u d y .................................... 30 Coding S y s t e m .................................. 30 Conception of the Relationship of Writer, Reader, and T e x t ............... '...................... 31 Content Analysis .................................. 33 Establishing Trustworthiness in Research .......... 33 Credibility.................................... 35 Transferability .............................. 37 Dependability ................................ 38 Confirmability .............................. 39 Limitations of the S t u d y ............................ 42 Concluding Discussion ............................ 43 CHAPTER III: The Psychological Context ................ 45 CHAPTER IV: The Physiological Context .................. 72 v CHAPTER V: The Natural Environment: Societal, Cultural, Political and Economical Context ........ 91 CHAPTER VI: The Adult Developmental Context .......... 122 CHAPTER VII: Concluding Discussion .................. 151 Further Research Suggestions .................... 174 APPENDICES A. A Conceptual Model for Discourse Construction 177 B. Adaptations of Definitions of Coding Categories 179 C. Revised Case Study M o d e l ....................... 183 D. Steinbeck Database ........................... 185 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................ 187 vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Introduction To develop a theory of human and creative development for a particular writer, the problem is accessing the author's intentions. This research will examine John Steinbeck's prior written autobiographical material such as journals and letters, from which intentions can be inferred from the writer's own words, rather than depending on biographies and testimonials. Steinbeck's The Journal of The Grapes of Wrath and Journal of a Novel will be used to delineate developmental forces associated with his process of writing. This research is not literary criticism. Background Rationale for Research Problem The New Historicism surge in composition research in the 1980's is an interest in literature's non-literary concepts, for example, tracing the history of texts and tracing the history of the reception of texts. Such an historic study of texts is an attempt by literary historians "to take an objective realistic view of past events, and to 'get inside' the minds of people who had participated in past events" (Angus 31). Angus defines historicism as "a fuller historical perspective" that includes "daily concerns of everyday people," "cultural, economic, ideological, political, and social issues.... studied for the way they shaped literary and non-literary responses to such matters as the relation of the individual to his community..." (31). Marilyn Butler (31), a professor of English literature at Cambridge University, explains that historicism is what can be known of the writer's thoughts, and also what an intelligent bystander of the day thought, and what an intelligent bystander now thinks, of a literary text. It provides a cultural perspective which gives researchers a fuller picture of what was going on in the culture of the writer, and how the writer transcends personal conflicts provoked by social change. By studying cultural, economic, ideological, political and social issues influencing a writer's perspective, the historian can interpret and reconstruct a literary text as a dominant source of evidence that a writer's words at any given moment in their historic existence represents the co-existence of social-ideological phenomena of the past and present. A writer's consciousness "can only become a consciousness by being realized in the forms of the ideological environment proper to it: in language, in conventionalized gesture, in artistic image, in myth, and so on" (Medvedeve/Bakhtin, qtd. in Booth 1982, 52). Taken in historic context, the writer's use of the language at one particular historic time is the sum total of the writer's past and present socio-ideological environment. This environment patterns, controls and molds the developmental processes operating in a writer, including socio-historical, internal psychological, biological and literary. With the information recorded in a writer's text, the past text can be read for present research. Thus, "retrospective ethnography," being used for this research from John Steinbeck's journals, has emerged as a research method in historicism for studies in history, English literature and composition, for example. By examining prior written biographical and autobiographical materials available from the past, a retrospective ethnographer studies a writer with a retrospective view in relation to the literary text. This method of research is not a discovery of new materials, but a new interpretation of the materials. In Stephen M. North's words