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In the spirit of Holden Caulfield and J.D. Salinger’s love of language, we present the Rant Nation. We will finish the assignment this Monday (3/23). Everyone who has ranted so far ranted true and well. And for that we can be truly proud.

In the mean time your homework for the weekend is to read up to chapter 18.

Jose Antonio Vargas is a former reporter for The Washington Post and shared a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings. In this piece Vargas discusses growing up undocumented in America: the alienation which stemmed from it and the feeling of being Other that he could never quite escape.

Holden Caulfield experiences alienation almost constantly during Catcher in the Rye. His whole experience is based on the inability to see himself as a part of something more than himself and his fear of joining a world he perceives as vapid, cruel, and fake.

Questions to Consider:

What similarities do Vargas and Holden possess?

How does Vargas deal with themes of “fakeness” and alienation?

How would Holden’s experience change if he was an undocumented student attending Pencey Prep? What might be similar?

Does Holden live with any privileges Vargas does not possess — and does this relate to his misanthropy?

Would Holden’s experience change if he was a woman or lived with disabilities? How about if he was a person of color or a member of the LGBTQ community? Would it change at all?

#NYTimes #Jose Antonio Vargas

John Green, author of Fault in Our Stars, argues that language and voice are the most salient details of The Catcher in the Rye. This is not a bad analysis or synopsis of the book. There are a few spoilers but largely the experience of the book is not hurt by it.

PSA: all analyses are arguments; you do not have to agree with anyone.

— J.D. Salinger

Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Here is the class Twitter account. I'll post reminders, assignments — largely, this will contain the same information as the Tumblr.

Here is the Holy Grail for all of your questions and concerns on the Catcher in the Rye. You will find homework, links to assignments, rubrics, journal questions, and a walk through of what we will do each day.

Reminder: This - like all things in life - is subject to change. I encourage you to check this periodically; I will mention any changes I make to the syllabus to you in class as well as over the twitter account.

#Catcher in the Rye #Syllabus

This week we start Catcher in the Rye. Written by J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye is considered a classic Coming of Age narrative. We meet Holden Caulfield - the narrator - who is on the verge of adulthood. And this terrifies him. Through out the book Holden walks the lonely and crowded streets of New York. He searches for booze, humanity, and love. All he wants is his innocence. Holden despises the city bourgeois for their “phoniness.” He hates apathy in the face of human suffering, alienation — despair. But Holden’s primary fear is that he is no different.

Graphic narratives can achieve powerful results. They can condemn, praise, complicate; they can make the mundane iconic. While Maus details a son's complicated relationship with his father (a Holocaust survivor), Persepolis deals with the growth of a girl growing up in Tehran. Marjane Satrapi, a Iranian born French graphic artist, has won many awards and her book is now a movie.

This week we wrap up our dissection of Maus: the themes, the symbolism, the story. Make sure you turn in your comics by Wednesday.

Here is a small slide show detailing the background of WWII: how it started, how Hitler rose to power, how poverty and globalization created desperate populations eager to be manipulated led, how the Jews were systematically removed removed society. Bit of a downer — but a necessary dose of truth for our dissection of Maus.

Spiegelman speaks.

Here’s an interesting interview with the author about his success with Maus and how that affected his life after it. There is no class mandate to watch this. But if you are interested it offers some more illumination on the whole piece.

German WWII Propaganda Posters.

Before Tumblr — before the internet — information was not quite so ubiquitous. It was easy to manipulate the distribution of information. If you had the power of a totalitarian state and the help of the wealthy elite (or the radically violent) a group of people could easily oppress thousands. Many moderns find it hard to understand how a society could learn to so pointlessly hate a group of people. Hate them enough to support mass murder and the building of concentration camps where humans turned to skeletons. It would be a genocide.

It would also be entirely systematic. Because education is part of the public political sphere it is very common for governments to attempt to influence schools one way or another to consolidate power. German schools did just this when they indoctrinated students with Aryan ideals; teachers taught that the Jewish people were vermin — a pest that caused only poverty and despair through Germany. The reality was largely different: Germany’s economy starved due to its loss in the previous World War I and because of economic sanctions imposed by the winners.

#WWII #Maus #Propaganda

Here are some propaganda posters America produced during WWII. Propaganda - like effective advertising - appeals to pathos: our sense of emotion — where we are not always logical. They present a visual argument. Normally these arguments functions on two levels. It contains an explicit argument (the clear message of the piece) and the an implicit argument (the underlying narrative). This is hidden from view normally.

Questions to Consider:

What are the implicit and explicit arguments of these posters?

Why would America rally women around war efforts and recruit them en masse when men had previously barred women from many factory jobs?

Is the portrayal of the Japanese racist?

Why might American companies or the government utilize narratives such as race in order to support war efforts?

America's newest generation think they are postracial, but data suggest otherwise

In which Sean McElwee argues that racism strongly persists among our modern American age despite many who believe we live in a “post-racial” society.

Questions to consider:

What does this article say?

What do you see that makes you say that?

What more can you find?

What bias may the writer hold?

What arguments do you agree with (if any)?

What critiques do you have (if any)?

#Al Jazeera

Temp Worker

n. Employees hired to assist employers to meet business demands yet allow the employer to avoid the cost of hiring a regular employees.

Migrant worker

n. an agricultural labourer who travels from place to place harvesting seasonal crops

n. a person with temporary permission to work in another country.

During Of Mice and Men George and Lennie survive as migrant workers. Born in the USA, they travel from farm to farm in order to etch out a living during the strenuous times of the Great Depression — attempting all the while to “live off of the fatta’ the lan,’” as Lennie says. Their goal is nothing short of the American Dream: the dream — in all its profound glory and wild reckoning. This motif or theme of the American Dream is going to play a major part in our analysis of the book; in particular we will investigate how this theme has changed (or remained static) through the past 100 years.

In this VICE News documentary we meet the underbelly of famous American companies such as Amazon, Best Buy, and other large corporations. These are not the white collar techies: these are those who work in the factories which ship those goods we so rely on. We will compare the struggles of these people, who often work in poor conditions and normally without benefits, as they attempt to navigate their own version of this American Dream.

Questions to Consider:

How do Lennie and George differ in their journey compared to many of the people we meet in this documentary?

How does capitalism respond to the American Dream? Does it in some ways sustain or propagate it?

How would Lennie and George’s story be different if took place in 2015?

In what ways does an investigation of temporary labor fall short of explaining the conditions of migrant workers such as Lennie and George in the Great Depression?

How do notions of race and power affect our understanding of these two different pieces?

#Of Mice and Men #Temporary Labor

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