Презентация к уроку "Сэлинджер"

About Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye

Language

The end

Jerome David Salinger was born in 1919 in New York. His father was a prosperous importer of ham and cheeses. The boy grew up with a sister who was eight years older than he. It was said of him that he was friendly with other children, but he always wanted to do unconventional things: for hours no one in the family knew where he was or what he was doing; he only showed up for meals. He seldom joined other boys in a game. Salinger did not do well at school, so his parents enrolled him in the Valley Forge Academy in Pennsylvania which was a military academy. There at night, tenting a blanket over his head to hide his flash­light beam from the Valley Forge duty officer, Salinger wrote his first short stories. Literature had been the only subject he had really liked at school.

On graduating the Valley Forge Academy he told his family that he wanted to become a writer. His father thought that was not the career for him; his son, he believed, should step into his father's shoes. So Salinger was sent to Poland to learn the ham business. For a couple of months he slaughtered pigs and waggoned them through the snow with the slaughter master. Then he returned to America.

During World War II he spent four years in the army and was sent to Europe. He was assigned to discover Gestapo agents by interviewing French civilians, and to capture Germans. In 1943, while Salinger was still in France, the American magazine Saturday Evening Post published his story "The Varioni Brothers". Sergeant Salinger sent the money he earned to the editor of the magazine Story to help other young writers.

In 1944Salinger met Ernest Hemingway, then a war-correspondent in France. Hemingway had read Salinger's stories and said that the young writer had "a helluva talent" (a hell of a talent). Some other stories of his, published in 1946 in the New Yorker, a very respectable literary magazine, brought him fame as a writer. One of these stories, "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut", was filmed. But Hollywood turned it into a"soap opera", that is to say, made a commercial film characterized by little action and much sentiment. (Some of these films used a story as a background for advertising soap and cosmetics, hence the derogatory name for them —"soap opera".) Since then Salinger has refused to sell any of his stories to film companies.

Salinger has become a classic because of his real understanding of American youth. His works written in the fifties, the years of the cold war, depict young boys and girls who have been justly called by critics the "silent generation", because they can't find their way in the post-war chaos. In his short novel "The Catcher in the Rye" and in his stories "Franny" and "Zooey" (1961), "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" (1963) and others, Salinger attained to portray kind and good normal young people who look queer and abnormal in the unnatural surroundings of modern bourgeois civilization.

Salinger sees the falsity of American life in the same way as his heroes. He has always disliked American sensational films about writers and actors, and photographs with scenes from the private lives of famous people, because he considers these to be intended mainly for publicity. He also hates American advertisements because they are meant to fool the public into buying things whether they need them or not, and he so detests fashionable social recreations, that he lives the life of a recluse.

Chapter 1

It was the last game of the year. Around three o’clock in the morning I was standing on the top of Thomsen Hill.

Chapter 3

I wrote about my brother Ailie's baseball mitt.

Chapter 4

All of a sudden, the lady got on at Trenton station and sat down next to me.

Chapter 6

Then she all of a sudden started to cry. And the next thing I knew I was kissing her.

Chapter 9

On the way something terrible happened. I dropped old Phoebe’s record.

Chapter 10

I imagine all little kids playing some game in a big field of rye. Thousands of little kids, and nobody is around- nobody big, I mean- except me.

Holden's sincerity is obvious in the way he expresses his thoughts. The colloquial phrases he uses are full of irony. His adjectives are vivid and exact. When he is angry and defiant he uses the words: stupid, crumby, lousy, dirty, funny, goddam and hell of a ..., and, of course, the word "phony". Thus we meet with: a phony smile, a phony handshake, a goddam Cadillac; the dirty movies, the lousy movies; she was getting funny (means she was getting angry). The adjective "terrific" may have a positive and negative meaning: she had terrific legs, she really looked terrific; and he was terrifically intelligent. In the negative Holden uses the word for a terrific bore, a terrific lecture, a terrific liar, etc.

When Holden is afraid to become sentimental he avoids details. He usually says that he is not in the mood, or that he detests that crap. Then he uses the phrases "and all", "and stuff, or "crap": "He's my brother and all" which meant "He is my brother and so on"; The old gun that was "in the Revolutionary war and all"; "They're nice and all"; "It's a pretty good book and all"; "She had her lipstick on and all"; “We had to go down with suitcases and stuff”, etc. When he is sad and tired

he uses crude slang phrases, such as "we were chewing the fat" meaning that they kept on

talking about anything.

In his search for truth Holden does not even trust himself When he says: "I really did", "It really does", "I honestly did", "I mean it", "If you want to know the truth", etc., Holden checks his own words all the time and hopes he is speaking the truth.

Coming through the rye, poor body,

Coming through the rye,

She draiglet a’ her petticoatie,

Coming through the rye.

Oh, Jenny’s wet, poor body,

Jenny’s seldom dry;

She draiglet a’ her petticoatie

Coming through the rye.

Gin a body meet a body

Coming through the rye,

Gin a body kiss a body-

Need a body cry?

Gin a body meet a body

Coming through the glen

Gin a body kiss a body-

Need the world ken?

Пробираясь вдоль калитки

Полем вдоль межи,

Дженни вымокла до нитки

Вечером во ржи.

Очень холодно девчонке,

Бьёт девчонку дрожь.

Замочила все юбчонки,

Идя через рожь.

Если кто-то звал кого-то

Сквозь густую рожь,

И кого-то обнял кто-то –

Что с него возьмёшь?