Published in 1951,The Catcher in the Rye encapsulated teenage angst. Some time ago David Belbin mused about the influence of Catcher on the proliferation and popularity of YA literature. Salinger's ...recent death has sparked a renewed interest in his work and more attention on Holden and his inheritors. This article discusses how five recent adolescent novels, with male protagonists, mirror Holden's adolescent paralysis. They exist in a liminal state between childhood and adulthood, attempting to understand the phonies around them. These protagonists help define the nature of the 'lost' adolescent in the current golden age of YA literature.
一九六○年代，為滿足中蘇論戰間反資批修的需要，《麥田裡的守望者》（The Catcher in the ...Rye）（塞林格，1951／1963）在政府部門與出版單位的雙層贊助下被首度引入大陸並受到嚴格管控，其內部發行的漢語譯本也就此構成了社會主義現實主義這個本土主流詩學體系的負面參照。但在小說譯介的政治考量和詩學衝突背後，還潛藏有更加複雜的互動機制。從贊助角度看，正因為作家出版社取得了政府贊助人下放的文本選擇權，社內的編輯兼譯者施咸榮才能訴諸體制授權，合法地挑中了《麥田裡的守望者》作為譯介對象，不過譯者的擇取標準未必就呼應著反資批修的政治號召，而可能是源自對小說藝術價值的肯定與恢復美國真容的企望。在詩學意義上，社會主義現實主義從抒情到象徵的話語動態交替歷程，召喚出圍繞該翻譯小說的跨境批判，這些批判又轉而透過對集體象徵的鞏固介入了持續流變的本土詩學，並最終助力於社會主義現實主義遵循著某種克服與超越的現代性脈絡不斷地推展。本文透過對有關史料的抽絲剝繭，力圖廓清小說在1960年代大陸的贊助機制和錯位詩學，進而呈現出小說譯本、意識形態及主流詩學的相與交雜，由此為內部發行的文化現象鉤沉起曾被忽略的個案細節，同時就翻譯文學的歷史書寫展開了一定程度的理論反思, To facilitate criticism of Western capitalism and Soviet revisionism during the 1960s Sino-Soviet dispute, The Catcher in the Rye was translated and published internally in the Mainland under the double-deck patronage of Chinese government agencies and the Writers Publishing House. The novel’s strictly regimented translation constituted a text subversive to socialist realism, the highly politicized poetic ordinance that governed the Chinese literary system at the time. Behind the political
Demands placed on many young Americans as a result of the Cold War give rise to an increasingly age-segregated society. This separation allowed adolescents and young adults to begin to formulate an ...identity distinct from previous generations, and was a significant factor in their widespread rejection of contemporary American society.
This study traces the emergence of a distinctive post-war family dynamic between parent and adolescent or already adult child. In-depth readings of individual writers such as, Arthur Miller, William Styron, J. D. Salinger, Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O'Connor and Sylvia Plath, situate their work in relation to the Cold War and suggest how the figuring of adolescents and young people reflected and contributed to an empowerment of American youth. This book is a superb research tool for any student or academic with an interest in youth culture, cultural studies, American studies, cold war studies, twentieth-century American literature, history of the family, and age studies.
In his seminal essay “Jewish-Americans, Go Home” (1964), Leslie Fiedler attacked postwar Jewish writing and its widespread use of what he controversially labeled “crypto-Jewish characters,”
who are ...in habit, speech, and condition of life typically Jewish-American, but who are presented as something else—general-American say, as in Death of a Salesman.
Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, as one of the most influential and culturally relevant novels of the 20th century, has often been put behind the myth of its protagonist, who is frequently ...considered to be a universal symbol of the American post-war teenage era. The goal of this paper is to examine how “Holden Caulfield” was formed in regards to dominant cultural values of its matrix context, but also to dismantle this very myth because, as will be shown, its process of constitution has often excluded important factors such as the post-war identity politics or how the novel itself relates to the literary conventions of modernity, all in favor of a biased approach on the grounds of traditional moral or essentialist concepts of youth. The novel’s reception will thus be particularly emphasized in order to analyze the relationship between the Catcher and the myth of the Catcher, and to note potential discrepancies between them, which might offer a broader picture than the one painted in and through the cultural perception of Holden. Finally, the ambivalent position of the modern subject will be outlined in regard to one’s institutional and linguistic determination, which draws attention to the blurred borders between the two major cultural paradigms of the 20th century and underlines the symbolic power of the literary medium and its relation to the complexity of (post)modern cultural dynamics, as well as discursive mechanisms that take part in its establishment.
The use of colloquial idioms is one of the most unique and defining aspects of the idiolect of Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. This research attempts to determine which of the two ...translations, Spanish and Catalan, retains more figurative/metaphorical meaning in their representations of such idioms. Our results would seem to suggest that the Catalan translation retains more figurative meaning. This translation employs on significantly more occasions lexicalized structures expressing similar metaphorical meaning, though differing in form while the Spanish translation, on significantly more occasions paraphrases or explains the idioms in question. This paper presents new findings as, to our knowledge, no studies have been carried out comparing the Spanish and Catalan texts in terms of figurative/metaphorical meaning retention in their representations of Holden Caulfield's colloquial idioms.
J. D. Salinger began work on his most celebrated and iconic novel,The Catcher in the Rye(1951), while on active military service in the Second World War. During this time, Salinger was stationed in ...Devon, England, and later in France, after taking part in the D-Day landings at Normandy; as he wrote to his erstwhile mentor, the Editor ofStorymagazine Whit Burnett: ‘Am still writing whenever I can find time and an unoccupied foxhole.’1, 2The novel started life as a series of short stories, all narrated by Holden Caulfield.³ These narratives contain many of the same scenes
Mid-twentieth-century fiction was full of odd children—sensitive young misfits and martyrs whose anxious vulnerability was a sign of their emotional, intellectual, and moral superiority to the ...conformists of the lonely crowd. In the Gothic South there was the tomboy of Carson McCullers’s Member of the Wedding (1946) and the sissy of Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948); in the West there was the tormented cowboy brother and sister of Jean Stafford’s Mountain Lion (1947); and in the Midwest there was the blank abused Candide of James Purdy’s Malcolm (1959). While demonic children were portrayed in William March’s Bad
J. D. Salinger wrote what critic Robert Bennett in his article "An Overview of The Catcher in the Rye" calls "one of the most widely read and discussed works in the American literary canon" and ...introduced the world to an antihero who became a cult favorite with readers. The Catcher in the Rye became "a generation's etiquette book and sometimes its bible, as Salinger's name came to dominate bull sessions and to be spoken of in the worshipful tones once reserved for Hemingway" (Pinsker 19), much to Salinger's consternation.
