Jerome David Salinger’s Negotiations:a New Historicist Study Of The Catcher In The Rye

Jerome David Salinger, a marvelous American writer, is well known for his controversial novel The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger is recognized by both critics and readers as a unique and influential writer in the American literature gallery after World War II. His novel The Catcher in the Rye is regarded as a classic work of American literature in the20th century. It has aroused great interests among both the critics and the readers since its publication in1951. In fact, The Catcher in the Rye has never failed in attracting critical attention.Although it has caught a lot of critical attention from different angles, we still find that this novel has not been analyzed in an all-round way in China when we have a survey of the research papers. Therefore, this thesis endeavors to conduct a research on The Catcher in the Rye from a new historical perspective that is rarely practiced previously.New Historicism stresses the subject’s motile ability. A writer is actually a negotiator, who negotiates everything through literature. Negotiation is realized between two dynamic social functions:subversion and containment. To study the negotiation in The Catcher in the Rye, this thesis will precede the research in the following steps:Chapter One will give an introduction to J.D. Salinger first, and then make a brief account of The Catcher in the Rye and literary review of it. In Chapter Two, the thesis will describe the main ideas of New Historicism and introduce the function of Stephen Greenblatt’s theory of literature’s negotiation, and finally try to find out the connecting points of this theory to the novel The Catcher in the Rye. In Chapter Three and Chapter Four I will give a detailed analysis of the two dynamic social functions: subversion and containment, aiming to point that negotiation is realized between them. Through these argumentations, the thesis will reach the conclusion in the last part, that is, although there are some frictions between oneself and mainstream society, one must recognize that reconciliation to the society is the ultimate choice, because we are all human beings who must survive in society.