Monthly Archives: July 2009

English fiction, narrative voice

Session #12: July 22nd, 2009 – “The Catcher in the Rye” and teenage skaz

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Today’s topic is teenage skaz and the selected text is an excerpt from CatSTsalingercher in the Rye (1951) by J.D. Salinger.

The story follows Holden Caulfield‘s experiences in New York City in the days following his expulsion from Pencey Prep, a fictional college preparatory school in Pennsylvania.

As I wrote in the previous post,

This novel is written in a style called “skaz”: a Russian word (which to English ears suggests “skat” and “jazz”). It means, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica:

in Russian literature, a written narrative that imitates a spontaneous oral account in its use of dialect, slang, and the peculiar idiom of that persona.

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English fiction, narrative voice

Session #11: July 1st, 2009

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Arnold Bennett, British novelist
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Today we discussed irony, and we read an extract from “Old Wives’ Tales” by British author Arnold Bennett.

It was not as difficult or challenging as Ayn Rand, which we have been reading for the past 3 sessions. However, the discussion was not quite as lively as in previous sessions. It seems that reading Rand gets people’s brain cells working.

UPDATE: Next session will be July 22nd, and we will read and discuss “Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger.  Although I chose this topic at random, actually there is a connection with irony: the “hero” of the story, Holden Caulfield, has this crazy idea that he wants to be the “catcher in the rye”. He remembers the Robert Burns poem incorrectly: he creates an image in his mind of a field of rye on a cliff-top: children are playing in the field, completely unaware of the danger of the cliff; his job is to catch them and save them from death.  It is not until almost the end of the novel that he learns (from his younger sister Phoebe) that he has made a mistake: the poem does not refer to a “catcher in the rye” but “if a body meet a body, coming through the rye.”

This novel is written in a style called “skaz”: a Russian word (which to English ears suggests “skat” and “jazz”). It means, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica:

in Russian literature, a written narrative that imitates a spontaneous oral account in its use of dialect, slang, and the peculiar idiom of that persona.

JD Salinger‘s novel is one example in English. Another is British writer’s Anthony Burgess‘s A Clockwork Orange. Salinger is a recluse.  He has repeatedly refused all attempts to obtain his permission to make a movie of his book.  Salinger was recently in the news but look at the photo! That is the most recent photo of Salinger? 1951??

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English fiction, novels of ideas

Session #10: June 24th, 2009

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Atlas Shrugged
Image by Rodrigo Paoletti via Flickr

In today’s session, we finished reading two extracts from Ayn Rand‘s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged.

We continued discussion some of the issues Ayn Rand raises in that book: capitalism, free trade, individualism, the axiom of non-aggression, etc.

We read a few extracts from Rand’s 1974 address to the graduating students at West Point, “Philosophy: Who Needs It?” We also read a quote from John Maynard Keynes about the importance of philosophers in general and of economists in particular to influence the thinking of the ordinary citizen.

The next session (July 1st, 2009) will be about irony.

A criticism that is often made of Rand’s political philosophy, is that she championed the businessmen and industrialists, yet they are the ones (it is said) who created the present financial crisis. Some people assume this means Rand’s entire philosophy is therefore completely ridiculous and without merit.

Ayn Rand rarely gave credit to other philosophers or thinkers except Aristotle. However, she did inherit many ideas about libertarianism and free-market economics from other thinkers. Here is one, Gabriel Kolko, who writes about a flaw in Ayn Rand’s thinking:

“the lords of Big Business, far from being martyrs to the cause of free market capitalism and “America’s Most Persecuted Minority,” as Ayn Rand had put it, were actually the most powerful and implacable enemies of laissez-faire. The corporate giants  had not only favored the Progressive era regulations [e.g. the New Deal], but had also originated them in an effort to cartelize the markets. Instead of a “persecuted minority,” the coporate giants were, in large part, a state-privileged elite. Far from championing free markets in principle or in practice, corporate barons had ruthlessly used the blunt instrument of government to erect barriers to market entry and bludgeon their competitors into submission.”

(from  “An Enemy of the State” by Justin Raimondo, Prometheus Books, Amherst NY, 2000 (page  138-9), quoting Gabriel Kolko, “The Triumph of Conservatism” (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1963).

So comedian  Stephen Colbert is hardly the first to point out this flaw in Rand’s world view.

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