6. Music and Race

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we think about the representation of music in the novel and how this relates to issues of race, focusing in particular on Holden's description on people who aren't white (e.g. "A very Cuban-looking guy") and especially the African-American singer Estelle Fletcher.

Course

In this course, Dr Sarah Graham (University of Leicester) explores J. D. Salinger's 1951 novel, The Catcher in the Rye. We begin with a broad introduction to Salinger's career as a writer as well as to what life was like in post-war America. After that, we consider how we might read the novel as a series of short stories, focusing in particular on Holden's meeting with Carl Luce in Chapter 19 and what it tells us about Holden's attitudes to sex and sexuality. In the third module, we think about Holden's relationships with and attitudes towards women in the novel, before turning in the fourth module to the figure of Holden's father and Holden's views on adulthood and masculinity more generally. In the fifth module, we think about Holden's distinctive voice in the novel, especially in relation to the themes of lies, truth-telling, sincerity and insincerity, before moving on in the sixth and final module to the importance of music in the novel and how this relates to issues of race, a pertinent topic in 1950s America.

Lecturer

Dr Sarah Graham is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Leicester. She has published two books about The Catcher in the Rye and is currently completing a study of J. D. Salinger's short fiction and a history of the bildungsroman. Her recent publications include J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (Routledge, 2007), and the chapter on J. D. Salinger in The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists (CUP, 2013).