Salinger and Updike

1. Salinger and Updike

2. Contents I.Postwar RealismП. Representatives:Norman MailerJerome David SalingerJohn Updike

3. I.Postwar Realism 1. Features of Postwar Realism 1) Postwar realism has been a search for vision that can relate an oppressed response to society and history. It has brought a new moral emphasis to fiction, a hunger to overcome despair, nihilism, and brutality through applying moral energy to culture. 2) Postwar realism especially concerns with human existence fighting for its selfhood in an era of modern mass society and power.

4. 3) The prosperous literature produced by ethnic groups of Jews, blacks, immigrants, southerners, and women in the postwar era not only shows a deep disquiet hidden in contemporary American life but also reveals the sense of existential crisis and the awareness of absurdity and nihilism.

5. П. Representatives 1. Norman Mailer (1923-2007) 1) Evaluation One of the most important writers of 20th century America. A multi-faceted talent: a novelist, a philosopher-metaphysician, a poet, a playwright, a filmmaker, a journalist, a politician, and a performer.

6. Mailer is considered an innovator of narrative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which superimposes the essay onto the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation.

7. 2) Works The Naked and the Dead (1948) one of the best American wartime novels Barbary Shore (1951) The Deer Park (1955) The Armies of the Night (1968) the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, National Book Award, Polk Award The Executioner’s Song (1979) the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. An American Dream (1965) Genius and Lust (1976)

8. 2. Jerome David Salinger (1919~2010) Salinger was born in New York City and educated at Valley Forge Military Academy, and at New York and Columbia universities The Catcher in the Rye (1951) Holden Caulfield Themes Language

9. Originally published for adults, it has been translated into almost all of the world's major languages. Around 250,000 copies are sold each year, with total sales of more than sixty-five million. The novel centered on a sensitive 16-year-old, Holden Caulfield, who flees his elite boarding school for the outside world of adulthood, only to become disillusioned by its materialism and phoniness. The novel's protagonist and antihero, Holden Caulfield, has become an icon for teenage rebellion.

10. 1) Holden Caulfield • He stands as a critic of society, taking a stance against phoniness, hypocrisy, obscenity, and passiveness. • He is an adolescent, caught between the worlds of childhood and adulthood. • With relation to the plot of the novel, Holden stands as a sort of anti-hero. Holden can be seen as an existentialist hero.

11. Anti-hero: principal character of a modern literary or dramatic work who lacks the attributes of the traditional protagonist or hero. The anti-hero's lack of courage, honesty, or grace, his weaknesses and confusion, often reflect modern man's ambivalence toward traditional moral and social virtues. Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605) Joyce's Leopold Bloom in Ulysses(1922) Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman (1949)

12. Obviously Holden’s strength does not rest in the traditional successes. He is fighting a Don Quixote type of battle in order to restore moral order. Holden is heroic in the deepest sense because he truly battles against sham and corruption. His nobility does not reside in his external success but rather in his spiritual struggle.

13. 2) Themes • J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is first and foremost about the journey of one individual, Holden Caulfield, into self-discovery. • The deepest-running theme of the book is Holden's stance against phoniness. • Another theme is that of childhood versus adulthood. 3) Language • colloquial and slang • off-hand speech

14. 4) Appreciate Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody'saround--nobody big, I mean--except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.

15. 4. John Updike (1932-2009 ) a writer of manners with his suburban settings, domestic themes, reflections of ennui and wistfulness, and, particularly, his fictional locales on the eastern seaboard, in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.

16. Major Works I. Rabbit, Run, (1960/50s)[Harry (“Rabbit”) Angstrom is young and runs away] II. Rabbit Redux(1971/60s)[He comes back.] III. Rabbit Is Rich (1981/70s) [He becomes rich.] IV. Rabbit at Rest (1990/80s)[He is dead.] V. Rabbit Remembered (Licks of Love) (2000)[He is memorized]

17. 1. Rabbit, Run(1960) is a mirror of the 1950s, with Angstrom: an aimless, disaffected young husband. 2. Rabbit Redux(1971)--- spotlighting the counterculture of the 1960s --- finds Angstrom still without a clear goal or purpose or viable escape route from mundaneness.

18. 3. InRabbit Is Rich(1981),Harry has become prosperous through an inheritance against the landscape of the wealthy self-enteredness of the 1970s, as the Vietnam era wanes. 4.Rabbit at Rest(1990), glimpses Angstrom's reconciliation with life, and inadvertent death, against the backdrop of the 1980s.

19. Homework Preview Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.