1.5 Review of Previous Studies
In conducting the research, references from some previous studies will be used as sources. The writer uses a novel In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck. In analyzing that novel, the writer needs supporting data from some critics, students, and academicians. Specifically, the writer looks at what these people say about the novel. John Steinbeck is one of famous novelists who has published many novels in his life. And to discuss a Steinbeck’s novel, the writer needs to attract some researchers. The researcher who has done a research on Steinbeck’s novel In Dubious Battle is Shawn Mark Jasinski a student of Vermont University, May, 2008. In his thesis entitled “John Steinbeck as a Radical Novelist”, he analyze about…show more content… Hegemony is the concept that is introduced by the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci. He explains that hegemony refers to the way bourgeois class dominate capitalist society through the ideology of political, social system and the culture. The writer founds in the novel that the upper class has more control of others.
The concept of hegemony, as developed by Antonio Gramsci can be defined as the process and state of the way of life and organising the distribution of resources and also the ways of thinking and understanding become dominant in a social formation. As being told by Mark McNally and John Schwarzmantel (2009) in their book Gramsci and Global Politics, in a quotation from Gramsci.
Hegemony is the introduction of ‘a new morality in conformity with a new conception of the world’ (Gramsci 1971: 366). From the point of view of hegemony as a process, hegemony combines the double supremacy of a social group, as both domination and intellectual and moral leadership (Gramsci 1971: 55). Gramsci states that ‘hegemony is political but also and above all economic, it has its material base in the decisive function exercised by the hegemonic group in the decisive core of economic activity’ (Gramsci 1975:…show more content… First assumption is asserts that hegemony, for Gramsci, involves a leading social group securing the (active or passive) consent of other social strata, rather than unilaterally imposing its decrees upon unwilling ‘subjects’. Second assumption argues that Gramsci viewed the proper terrain of hegemony as civil society, rather than the state. The third assumption further extends the consent-civil society/coercion-state binary opposition, in order to characterise two qualitatively distinct geographical zones of West and East. The fourth assumption argues that Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is indifferent to its class content. Both as a term of theoretical analysis and as a political strategy, this ‘consensual power’ is valid for proletarian and bourgeois