Call for Papers
PAMLA Steinbeck Panel Proposal
Nov. 12-15, 2026
Seattle, Washington, Hyatt Regency Seattle
Title:
Steinbeck’s Complicated American Imagination
Abstract:
This panel invites discussions of Steinbeck's complicated imagination of American
life and culture in his novels and nonfiction. Alternately fraught and adoring, critical
and laudatory, his works attend with specificity to Americanness as a unique and discernible identity in the first half of the twentieth century.
Especially encouraged are papers that attend to the tensions and disjunctures in Steinbeck’s
descriptions of American society, including his treatment of gender, decolonial readings
of his novels, and approaches that expose often contradictory relationships that extend
among people, places, and power in his body of work.
Description:
East of Eden, John Steinbeck’s 1952 magnum opus, assigns philosophical prominence to Lee, a Chinese-American
man. Late in the novel, in a rare moment of self-disclosure, he diagnoses the American
condition, as he sees it:
“…we are all descendants of the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers, and brawlers. But also the brave, and independent, and generous. If our ancestors hadn’t been that, they would’ve stayed in their home plots in the other world and starved over the squeezed-out soil... That’s why I include myself. We all have that heritage, no matter what old land our fathers left. All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies. It’s a breed—selected out by accident. And so we’re overbrave and overfearful—we’re kind and cruel as children. We’re overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We’re oversentimental and realistic. We are mundane and materialistic—and do you know of any other nation that acts for ideals? We eat too much. We have no taste, no sense of proportion. We throw our energy about like waste. In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture. Can it be that our critics have not the key or the language of our culture?”
This panel approaches Steinbeck’s imagination of “Americanness” in Lee’s same spirit, and with the general theme of this conference, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict” in mind. Steinbeck’s complicated depiction of these facets of American life— culture, power, and conflict— translate to our contemporary cultural predicament, in which xenophobia, racism, sexism, and the roiling threat of authoritarianism undergird the bulk of political life. By attending to the complications in Steinbeck’s novels, we can create a more truthful shared vocabulary for discussing the politics and culture of the early twentieth-century with an eye toward its influence on the rightward trend of the last few decades of American political activity. Literature affords us an imaginative lexicon to describe what an “intervening culture” might look like, given our often-obfuscated history and its bearing on the present. And critically, we might also begin to articulate a revised vision of American culture— one that acknowledges all the contradictions and tensions that Lee identifies. We can make space for the love and the cruelty, our ideals and their manifestation, for a clear-eyed sense of the future.
Please here.
