Literary Manifestation And Social Reality

The issue and thesis statement;Self-identity is a universal and an eternal issue for people as social beings; due to the diversity and the ever-changing nature of human experience,there is always reoccurring or new need to probe this issue in a new context.Apart from that,the United States is a country of immigrates with different ethnic,racial,national and historical background,which naturally heightens the issue of self-identity,more than often,to the status of crisis for some Americans,especially for the adolescents.In the few decades after the World Warâ…¡,American economy developed quickly and every aspect of social system has made progress and people's living standards have been improved remarkably so that most American enjoyed not only the benefits of economical prosperous and political stability as well as the social welfare but also the abundant opportunities to achieve their American Dreams. However,under this peaceful circumstance,in some literary works,the protagonists, who are always adolescents,noticed the negative aspects of society,such as,the phoniness and indifference as well as the racial discrimination and suffered them so painful that they were at a lose and confused about their own identities.The central issue of this research is probing the self-identity issue of American adolescents arising from two representative literary works;Salinger's Catcher In the Rye and Ellison's Invisible Man.It is held by the author that an interdisciplinary and contrastive research on the self-identity issues through these two representative works throws new light on our understanding of the nature,the social reality,the literary diversity and influence of the issue under discussion.Rationale and methodological consideration;The self-identity issue is universal, but also differs from group to group and from individual to individual in terms of its manifestations and intensity.What is the universality,generality and particularity of American adolescents' experience as manifested in representative literary works? Moreover,literary works are often considered reflections of the social reality,but to what extent shall we accept them as true apart from their literary values? In response to such questions,this research has adopted as major methodological considerations contrastive analysis and theoretical frameworks form social sciences such social psychology,developmental psychology and some conceptions in cultural anthropology such as universality,generality and particularity in the hope of preventing the findings of this research being a mere matter of personal opinion. Although the two works have been over-researched and self-identity is a standing issue in literary studies,here are some major originalities for doing this research.1)A contrastive analysis of self-identity between the two works is a new attempt, especially when the two subjects,the protagonists of the novels,are respectively representatives of the majority and minority societies.2)Since the two main characters in question are both adolescents,a white and a black youth,it is intended to discuss the adolescent identity crisis from the angles of social psychology and the developmental psychology.3)One focus for discussion herein is that the settings of the two novels are either in the 1940s or 1950s; both were times of economic and social prosperity in America,which poses contrasts to the crisis of protagonists' self-identity.4)The analysis of the foregoing issues will not only rest on the descriptive and contrastive level; it is also attempted to gain some insight into the university,generality and the particularity of adolescents' experience through this research.Therefore,the focus of this research concerns the American adolescents' psychological and cognitive experiences,especially the searching for self-identity in the 1940s/50s as reflected in literary work and the theoretical frameworks to be employed are multi-dimensional,including social and developmental psychologies and some culture-anthropological approaches as well as literary analysis.Efforts also had been made to explore such incongruity between the reality and literary representations which had also been discussed through the detailed analysis of the American adolescents' psychological experiences,especially the searching for self-identity in the 1940s/50s as reflected in literary work and the actual political, economical and educational situation,it is finally found that the literary manifestation fundamentally reflects the true life.In my dissertation contrast,induction,deductive,case-analysis as well as top-down method will be employed to analyze the adolescents' development.Organization and major contents; Chapter One introduces the central issue,rationale,and methodological considerations.Chapter Two focuses on the discussion of background information and self-identity issues in Catcher in the Rye and The Invisible Man.Chapter Three introduces some guiding concepts from social psychology and developmental psychology.Chapter Three introduces some guiding concepts from social psychology and developmental psychology.Chapter Four presents a contrastive analysis between Catcher in the Rye and TheInvisible Man.Chapter Five discusses the relation between literary manifest and social reality through contrasting the relevant social reality and the literary manifests.Chapter Six tries to discuss the universality,generality and particularity of adolescents' experience.Chapter Seven concludes this research with summery of its findings and limitation.Conclusion;This paper has discussed by way of social and developmental psychology and contrastive analysis the American adolescents' psychological and cognitive experiences,especially the searching for self-identity and socialization,in the 1940s/50s as reflected in literary works and its social significance.It can be concluded that in spite of the sharp contrast between the two major chapters in social and racial background,they both suffer from self-identity crisis in their own ways; and the literary manifest of their experiences in contrast to the social reality of their times may have revealed an essential fact that they are both common and exceptional in a way;their crisis seems to inconvincible,while the majority of adolescents have succeeded in their socialization in spite of the similar problems they have had.The distinction between universality,generality and particularity is logically sound and can be used to analyze literary phenomenon as well as culture-anthropological ones.