Steinbeck in a Pandemic

Jones, Gavin

doi:10.5325/steinbeckreview.18.1.0001

Gavin Jones

GAVIN JONES is the Frederick P. Rehmus Family Professor of the Humanities at Stanford University, where he has taught American literature since 1999. He is the author of Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (U of California P, 1999), American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840–1945 (Princeton UP, 2008), Failure and the American Writer: A Literary History (Cambridge UP, 2014), and Reclaiming John Steinbeck: Writing For the Future of Humanity (Cambridge UP, 2021).

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Abstract

Ranging from To a God Unknown (1933) to The Pearl (1947), this essay explores Steinbeck's biopolitical imagination, which is of pressing concern today because it involves the relationship between our biological selves and our political climate, between contagion and human community. It also involves crucial questions about the future. Where are we heading, as a species? What changes do we face, how do we contemplate extinction, and what grounds are there for a fragile sense of hope? In other words, this essay is about why and how to read Steinbeck in a pandemic.

species, disease, biopolitics

2021

The Pennsylvania State University

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Steinbeck in a Pandemic

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