Pinched - Jack London, Appunti di Letteratura Angloamericana

Scarica Pinched - Jack London e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Angloamericana solo su Docsity! PINCHED BY JACK LONDON Jack London is one of the most famous writers in American culture. He was not only a writer, he was a journalist and theatre writer. He tried many things in his life and these stories partially take on all the experiences that he had —> he spent many years travelling in the United States (he spent many years being a vagrant). Martin Eden was probably his most famous novel, but also many others like Star Rover,which is very interesting because this book takes place in prison and it is the story of a man who is condemned to die and he finds a way to get out of prison at least mentally. That book obviously is also based on his experience in jail. Jack London embodies very much the myth of the self made men (not the self made men which we have already seen in Thoreau's philosophy of American individualism, but the self made artist) — he doesn't have a training as a writer, he turns his life into art in some way; so in this sense he's a self made artist. He was very much concerned by social disadvantage in the United States and so he also took part in contemporary debates about society and politics and he claimed publicly to be a socialist, to be interested in the well being of the lower classes. He was very popular: he wrote books for children; in some sense, for a long time, he was considered a “pop writer” who is a writer who wrote stories that didn't have much literary values (because he was very popular, everybody read them but they didn't have such a strong literary elements). SOME OF HIS WORKS: ® Martin Edenis an autobiographical novel that developed in 1909, it's the rise and fall of a young working class man. ® The Roadwas published in 1907 which is the autobiographical narrative of his life as a tramp in the 1890s. So this is another one of the most popular american myths — the myth of travelling — in the second part of the 19th century travelling was related to going West, conquering new territories (The Gold Rush). London sets up the literary context for telling the lives of people who travel without having a destination, people who are just travelling maybe because they don't get money or they're curious to see new countries. This is where the definition of vagrancy comes in. There is a sociological background for this story which is how the concept of vagrant develops in the United States and how it has been legally regulated. Vagrancy became like one of the first types of crimeone of the first types of offences in legal terms. Why would vagrant be considered as an offence? Because vagrancy has to do with people who don't have means of support, people who don't have a house, people who are not working, people who the american society considers potentially dangerous, potentially turning into criminals (because they don't have money,a house or a job). In legal terms is quite a difficult concept because vagrancy is not simply prohibiting certain actions but there are also moral problems. So vagrancy regulations are very vague, they are opened to interpretation but certainly all the attempts are not considering vagrancy a crime. Vagrant people were poor and american constitution does not define poverty as a crime. Poverty is not a crime however we will see that American Society tends to see poverty as some kind of crime that might very well have to do with the individualistic background of America (the idea that you have to make it by yourself, you cannot expect the government or other people to help you. So you gotta be dynamic, active and gotta fight in order to find your position in society). Vagrant people are not trying to make money, are not trying to claim the social ladder,they are trying to get any better position then the one they are in; so they are by definition poor people and poor people that don't have a goal are quite easily going to fall into criminality. Prison, jail, penitentiary, these are all different concepts in the United States. They refer to the same semantic domains but they mean different things. For instance jail is usually applied to small prisons like the one we see in western movies. Penitentiary takes the name from the Latin penitencia that takes his name from a religious background, it's a place where we are going to repent of the wrong we did to society. Penitentiary is usually characterised by two main features: ® the model of constant separation (prisoners are in single cells and separated from each other day and night, they cannot talk to each other). This model is based on the model of