The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck

This title is available at the Bay Tree Bookstore.

At UCSC, College core courses are designed to immerse students in critical reading, academic writing, and seminar discussion at the university level. To do so, all core courses center on an interdisciplinary theme, which reflects issues in contemporary scholarship. Students who do well in the core course are those who engage analytically with the material and with the seminar discussions, who devote themselves to their papers through several drafts, who read other students' work attentively and responsively, and who do thorough, ethical research.

The College Eight core course, "Environment and Society" (CLEI 80), introduces students to environmental history and environmental concerns, focusing particularly on environmental justice and principles for addressing environmental problems. Students read widely, considering such issues as the effects of pollution on human health and the environmental costs of certain kinds of economic development. They write argumentative essays in which they bring their own perspectives to the reading.

In addition, all students participate in service-learning work through the College Eight Sustainability Project, exploring issues of waste reduction and sustainable agriculture through hands-on engagement.

Summer 2008 Reading Assignment: Students should read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck before classes begin!

We will be using John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath to structure our exploration of the environment. If you've read the book before, re-read it not as a work of literature but as a documentary of people who are reacting to economic and ecological forces, and then try to imagine what the current version of the novel would be: a family in Guatemala who can't make a living raising corn, or one in Africa fleeing a civil war brought on by competition for land or water?

In the spirit of College 8, we encourage you to buy a used copy of the book (even one that's marked up is fine, as long as there's room for you to add your comments). Any edition will do, though the most common version is a paperback published by Penguin (it's 455 pages, so try to find a copy that has approximately that many pages in order to make it easy to follow along in class). Most towns have a used book store, and you can get used books online as well. If you want a new copy, you might try an independent rather than a corporate chain bookstore.

UCSC's core courses are the first in a two-quarter composition requirement. In addition, they assist students who have not yet satisfied the Entry Level Writing Requirement (ELWR) in meeting the requirement. All core course sections are designed to facilitate students' development as thinkers and writers, to sharpen their critical skills, and to introduce them to university discourse, broadly conceived.