Out of the Dust

1. Breathes life into what people may have considered irrelevant and dull. 2. Implies the present is a part of the living past. Connects the struggles of past to the present 3. Readers can feel the time period. (History textbooks don’t help readers make personal connections with the past.) 4. Sugar coating? Watch out! 5. The two biggest challenges to historical accuracy. Nostalgia are usually inaccurate. Anachronisms reduce verisimilitude. 6. History seen through the eyes of a young protagonist.

In what context is history presented?  As growth (more common in American ChLit)  We’re climbing toward improvement  We have problems because we’re making progress  Things are getting better. We are better people than people in the past.  Learned from farming mistakes so Dust Bowl won’t happen again  As cycle (more common in European ChLit)  History repeats itself  We don’t always learn from the past  We are no better than our parents  Things will return to normal ( Number the Stars p. 132)  Seasonal divisions.

 There’s been a move in the last 20 years in Western historical literature (America especially) to make themselves look bad. A historical corrective.  Use of literature to admit wrongdoing.  Helps to alleviate guilt. (native peoples, slavery, racism)  Perhaps reading, studying, and thinking about racism can help to solve the problem.

 When they convey a sense of nostalgia, they are generally inaccurate.  Factual accuracy vs. generalized accuracy.  Which details can be changed and which cannot?  We can check weather statistics to see if the particular storms did occur on exactly the dates Billie Joe gives to them.  Details about FDR and political situation.  Historical novels used to educate and teach  The best education we can get is from our own social culture  Compare Out of the Dust with John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.  Writers of historical fiction need to watch out for anachronisms.

 The utilization of an event, a person, and object, or language in a time when that event, person or object was not in existence.  In a movie of the ancient Romans, the people cannot be wearing blue jeans, wrist watches, or glasses.  In Out of the Dust, Billie Jo cannot talk about using to keep in contact with her friends.  We often get more of the values of the author’s culture than the values of the culture being written about. We see the old culture through the lens of the modern author.  Feminism, individualism, democracy, various political and religious ideas.

Value statements are embedded in every work.  What values do different characters have? And which values does the text support and critique?  Strong sense of pride and honesty (returning incorrect change)  Family relationship  Husband-wife relationship  Mother is a person of few words. Too much praise spoils children.  Poor help the poor. Generosity.  Too much entertainment is dangerous.  Children should focus on studies

In pictures How do these images fit with your ideas after reading?

Cimarron County The Dust Bowl Region

Dust Storms

Effects of the Dust Storms

Faces of the Great Depression

Heading West (out of the dust)

Farming in the Dustbowl

Oklahoma Wheat Fields

Harvesting wheat with a combine

Harvesting Wheat with a Combine (around 1920)

Tumbleweeds

Soup lines full of men seeking free meals

FDR Franklin Deleanor Roosevelt appealed to the common people through the recently invented radio. His “New Deal” brought hope to people without money or work.

The Dionne Quintuplets: Such Fertility! “A freak show” Extra babies when Billie Jo’s family can’t even get one more and so many other families can’t take care of their own.

Bonnie and Clyde (famous criminals of the era)

It’s not just what is said, but how it’s said. Content and form are equal.

 Word choice  Consider connotations and denotations  p. 3 With a wide mouth: 1) talkative, 2) odd looking  Latinate and Germanic Diction  Poetry is often associated with fancy or elaborate vocabulary.  Is French a more poetic language than German?  This need not be the case. Hesse uses simple, clear, unpretentious language  Much more Germanic or Anglo-Saxon than Latinate

 Old English is Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) in its forms, structures, and vocabulary. But at around 1100, the Normans invaded England causing French, a romance language (meaning it is derived from Latin) to mix with Old English. During the Renaissance ( ), thousands more words were imported directly from Latin.  For this reason, English today mixes Germanic and Latinate roots. Often we can find pairs of words, near synonyms, of which one comes from an Anglo-Saxon root and one from a Latinate root. Sometimes there are three closely related words, one each from Anglo-Saxon, from Latin via French, and directly from Latin, as in kingly (Germanic), royal (from French roi ), and regal (from Latin rex, regis ).  As a (very rough) general rule, words derived from the Germanic ancestors of English are shorter, more concrete, and more direct, whereas Latinate words are longer and more abstract: compare, for instance, the Anglo-Saxon thinking with the Latinate cogitation.  Most “bad” language is of Anglo-Saxon ancestry: compare, for instance, shit (Germanic) with excrement (Latinate).

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