The Fantasy of Youth in Philip Roth's Later Novels

A Teenage Wasteland: Catcher in the Rye, 2020

A Teenage Wasteland: Catcher in the Rye Our thoughts about war often formed by literary works and surely no other writer could be associated with war more than Ernest Hemingway. He visited many battlefronts during in his lifetime, and he was even wounded by an Austrian mortar shell. (Waldhorn). His experience of war along with his dedication to realism played a fundamental role for most of his works. He held his experience of war so close to his heart that it became a lifetime concern. He dealt with what happens to the soul after going through war and how one can cope with it. Of course, he was neither the first nor the last author who experienced the cruelty of war. In fact, Hemingway befriended another author during the war, the famous J. D. Salinger. (Hoban) Salinger's experience of the war was as firsthand as Hemingway's, and one could say his battle scars ran even deeper than his comrade; he was one of the first American soldiers to ever witness Nazi concentration camps where he saw numerous burned victims of hate and tyranny. (Hoban) Yet his works does not carry the traces of war as explicit as Hemingway does. There are no battlefields, no guns, no concentration camps, no soldiers, and nothing related to war whatsoever. In his famous work, Catcher in the Rye, we are only presented with a teenage boy, Holden Caulfield and his wander-ings around the New York City. Characterized partially by his untimely grey hair and skinny appearance, Holden Caulfield is both the narrator and protagonist of the novel, and tells his story after being expelled from his school mainly because academic failure. His voice carries an adolescent attitude in which one can feel his alienation among society; a stranger that can neither fit in nor met with the

2005

Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Department of English Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works by an authorized administrator of Montclair State University Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Counterlife, through the lens of liberal irony. This investigation critiques Roth's protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman, as a man who pursues individual perfection and wholeness, becoming an ironist, while failing to care about communal responsibilities, and hence, not achieving the liberal utopia Rorty envisions. Zuckerman's pursuit of ironist individuation exhibits his unsuccessful attempts to integrate what Rorty identifies as necessary for successful individual perfection (i.e. liberalism). Without the humane quality of such a liberalism, an ironist stands on the verge of degrading into no more than a solipsistic, revisioning megalomaniac-fashioning the world after his own image and mollifying his own desires. Ultimately, Rorty is concerned with language as that which is "the constitutive core of all experience" (Groden and Kreiswirth 626). If this is so, narratives enable us to apprehend our subjective realities and to exert creative control over our individual worlds. While Rorty rejects

American Literary History, 2010

What exactly is the trouble with age? Over the last thirty years of studies in American literature and culture, the analyses of gender, race, and sexuality have become transformatively central and integral to the field. Indeed, one can hardly think about American literature anymore without engaging the social and symbolic relations systems constituted by these categories or their histories. And yet, we have hardly scratched the surface of age, arguably the one other major bodily rubric for sorting and classifying modern subjects. To be sure, there is a thriving subfield for the study of children's literature. Likewise, by way of British cultural studies, youth culture has found a modest niche in American studies. 1 Yet even within these two rather marginal and ghettoized areas of investigation, let alone outside of them, systematic investigations of age as an organizing cultural category are still rare and underappreciated when they appear. 2 This is unfortunate for several reasons. As Kathleen Woodward notes, the signification of gender, race, and sexuality are profoundly altered by aging (x). Even more, age serves as a crucial axis of social and semiotic difference in its own right, with tremendous implications not only for the life courses and conditions of individuals and populations, but also for the metaphors, figures, and narratives by which we are ideologically governed. Only in the last decade has "age" begun to enter the field as a belated category of inquiry, pushed from three principal directions: first, incisive feminist investigations of the culture of aging; second, a broadening of the cultural studies approach to youth *Leerom Medovoi directs the Portland Center for Public Humanities at Portland State University. He publishes on permanent war, age studies, biopolitics, race, and globalization, including Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (2005).

Cambridge Quarterly, 2010

rilale-uac, 2019

Cet article se propose de démontrer à travers une méthode éclectique, y compris les approches historico-biographique, sociologique, psychologique, philosophico-morale et déconstructioniste, que The Catcher in the Rye est le récit poignant et plein d'humour de l'aventure mouvementée et incertaine d'un garçon déchiré entre l'enfance et l'âge adulte. Le narrateur autodiégétique glorifie l'enfance, symbole d'authenticité, d'innocence, de pureté, de simplicité, de véracité, de sincérité, d'honnêteté, en un mot de tous les attributs positifs diamétralement opposés aux tares qui gangrènent le monde des adultes, notamment l'aliénation mentale et culturelle, le matérialisme, l'artificialité, la corruption, l'hypocrisie, l'égoisme, le mensonge, la curiosité, la duplicité, la violence, etc. D'où sa peur de grandir, c'est-à-dire d'être en captivité dans la société, donc de perdre son vrai moi et son innocence. Toutefois, le protagoniste finit par faire preuve de réalisme en comprenant et en aceptant que le passage à la maturité est un processus naturel inhérent à la condition humaine. Abstract This article intends to demonstrate through an eclectic method, including the historical-biographical, the sociological, the psychological, the moral-philosophical, and the deconstructionist approaches, that The Catcher in the Rye is the poignant and humorous narrative of theeventful and uncertain adventure of a boy torn between childhood and adulthood. The autodiegetic narrator idealizes childhoodas a symbol of authenticity, innocence, purity, simplicity, truthfulness, sincerity, honesty, in sum, all the positive attributes diametrically opposed to the vices that corrupt the world of adults, includingmental and cultural alienation, materialism, artificiality, moral degradation, hypocrisy, selfishness, lies, inquisitiveness, duplicity,violence, etc. Hence his fear togrow up, that is, to be in captivity, therefore to lose his true self and his innocence. Howenver, the protagonist finally demonstrates pragmatism by understanding and accepting that maturating is a natural process inherent in the human condition.