Subject: Re: Hello!
From: WILL HOCHMAN (hochman@uscolo.edu)
Date: Tue Feb 11 1997 - 22:28:14 GMT
I encountered some of that literary elitism at NYU (Salinger went there
for a term but knew he could learn more from whit burnett uptown at
columbia) but found that folks who put him down rarely knew enough about
the texts to be worth listening to...but ENGLISH TEACHERS giving people
crap about reading Salinger, now there's a joke--after all, catcher is one
of literacy's best tools--so many people find holden's narration
attractive enough to begin reading books--so many young adults find wisdom
and spirit in the 9 stories--the only thing to say is that real literary
value is something each reader knows...
As for the everyone goes through a catcher phase bullshit--lot's of people
get enthusiastic about a book that touches them and not everyone does it
with the literary or critical methods some would expect. So
what--literature goes way beyond that and school to the very frontiers of
self and life...but keep in mind, I think both litcrit and life readings
are important and I do enjoy listening to most of Salinger's readers for a
growing variety of reasons.
will
-
To remove yourself from the bananafish list, send the command:
unsubscribe bananafish
in the body of a message to "Majordomo@mass-usr.com".
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Mon Oct 09 2000 - 14:59:01 GMT