SOURCE: Hearle, Kevin. “The Pastures of Contested Pastoral Discourse.” Steinbeck Quarterly 26, nos. 1 & 2 (winter-spring 1993): 38-45.

In the following essay, Hearle asserts that the “discourses that are dialogically opposed to one another in The Pastures of Heaven represent variations on two competing perspectives—rural and urban—on the pastoral.”

In “Discourse in the Novel,” the Russian theoretician Mikhail Bakhtin states,

[T]he central problem in prose theory is the problem of the double-voiced, internally dialogized word in all its diverse types and variants. … [T]he object is always entangled in someone else's discourse about it, it is already present with qualifications, an object of dispute that is conceptualized and evaluated variously, inseparable from the heteroglot social apperception of it.¹

In The Pastures of Heaven, the object Steinbeck approaches dialogically is the American “pastoral” West. The title of the book—which is explained in the initial, framing chapter as the exclamation...