Anne Trubek on Why We Shouldn’t Still Be Learning Catcher in the Rye | Hacker News Reader

Anne Trubek on Why We Shouldn’t Still Be Learning Catcher in the Rye

goodmagazine.com

11 pointsrobg19 comments

Arguing that Catcher in the Rye is obsolete because it no longer holds the shock value it once did is like arguing we should stop reading Shakespeare because nobody talks that way anymore. Good literature is good literature.

Plus Holden is hilarious. Everybody else is a phony.

Plus, no one ever talked that way. Shakespeare was always peculiar. He invented hundred of neologisms.

The message/theme of this book is timeless. I hope my children (not yet conceived) will read it, and their children too.

There will never be a shortage of youth that are lost/confused and at the same time coming of age.

Some argue that we should forgo teaching children the classics because newer, somehow more relevant literature with the same message is now available. The point of reading the classics is that these things are timeless, and so reading the work of the first person to write about a certain topic in depth is like reading a primary source. In other words, it should be encouraged in academia.

Things are deemed "timeless" when people keep reading them over the generations. And your argument for why they should read them in the first place is that they're "timeless". That's circular.

As for "primary source", that's if you treat ideas as historical artifacts. If you're actually interested in the ideas themselves, a more apt metaphor would be learning obsolete technology. This is sometimes good, but not often. For example, I recently learned how Intel 8080 works, because I wanted to know more about how CPUs work, and modern ones were too complicated for me.

The themes/messages are timeless, not the works themselves. Here is my point: Would you rather read Plato, Aristotle, and the like, or the writings of a more "modern" philosopher who had conceivably based his opinions on all three?

And yes, using word timeless twice in my original post does make the argument appear circular. Works are not timeless because they are timeless (circular indeed!) but because their themes are timeless AND they were the first to thoroughly explore those themes.

OK, define "timeless" that way. It still doesn't follow that these things are worth reading. Being first doesn't make you best. Figuring out what's best is a very hard problem, of course, but it's a problem worth trying to solve, rather than giving up and going for the next best thing, which is prestige. Plato and Aristotle are good examples, because reading them is a waste of time (but very prestigious). See http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html.

PG doesn't say that, not in my reading at least. If you're interested in the current state of philosophy, I think that's a great essay. But in it, I think the claim is that you need to read the classics to learn from their mistakes. That is, if you want to "do philosophy".

And while PG may be unsure of his influences, the more I read his essays the more I see serious traning in philosophy. He's meticulous in defining concepts and using them consistently. That's exactly the problem and goal of post-Wittgenstein philosophy. Sure, the ultimate utility of the field of philosophy is in question. But, to me, the endeavor has a firm role to play in the education of the mind. Math is more precise, but most of us communicate everyday by using concepts. In conversation, though, how do we make sure we're using the same (or similar) concepts with each other? How do we know we're consistent with ourselves in our own concepts?

"What philosophy books would you recommend?

I can't think of any I'd recommend. What I learned from trying to study philosophy is that the place to look is in other fields."

http://www.paulgraham.com/raq.html

The essay, you referenced, is "How to do philosophy". If you're going to do philosophy, the approach he proposes includes learning from past mistakes.

That said, I agree with his answer to the raq - you'll be better served by doing philosophy in other fields. Still, I think that's a big difference from saying those classics are a waste of time. In learning to abstract concepts, learning from previous struggles isn't a bad way to go. I am agnostic, however, on the best ways to learn how to abstract concepts.

Am I the only one who couldn't stand Catcher In The Rye? Who found himself completely unable to empathize with the character of Holden Caulfield -- a whiny teenage loser who thinks (despite all evidence to the contrary) that he's special?

I only read it once (I was probably 15 or so) but I couldn't relate to him then, and I don't think there's been any other stage in the intervening 13 years at which I could have related to him, either.

"Learning" Catcher in the Rye? What about just reading it because it is a damn fine piece of literature? Maybe this person didn't get the book because she "learned" it, rather than appreciated it for what it is. How do you learn a piece of fiction, anyway?

Perhaps adolescents these days are smart enough to read BOTH The Catcher in the Rye and a contemporary equivalent, and compare how the specifics have changed, but the feelings and emotional driving forces are still very similar. It's not the What or the How, it's the Why that makes TCitR such an amazing book. Just because typewriters are obsolete now doesn't mean books that were written on them are...

I read Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird years after I finished school. I'm by no means a literary snob and read all sorts of fiction (except I haven't gotten around to Harry Potter yet), but there's a reason why these books are taught in school over say Dan Brown... they're damn good. Especially without the burden of school assessment.

I think back to the books that I did read at school, like Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Fitzgerald's Gatsby, and I can instantly see the quality in those works. Same goes for "classics" I've read in recent years, like Marquez, Camus, Frank Herbert, Huxley, etc.

That said, there have been some classics I've found tiresome. I've never been able to finish a Dostoyevsky book, and Kafka was hard going without being very fulfilling. But in general, the classics are really fucking good.

I don't think it's really an argument for removing CitR, but rather a dramatically-titled article that basically states that the book has retired. It's not getting frayed edges - it's dusty. The young individuals it was initially meant to influence have grown up and are part of the AARP.

I have no doubt that Trubek feels CitR can (and should) be taught as a classic like David Copperfield. But it's ironic to expect teachers to ignore the new literature of the next 50 years. Trubek has engaged in a common exercise by offering new options, with an edge, that demonstrate that classics are being written today - just like CitR was for the 60s.

I vote for Battle Royale, but Trubek's list isn't bad... =)

The article doesn't suggest any books to replace Catcher in the Rye. I would probably suggest "Drown" by Junot Diaz:

http://www.amazon.com/Drown-Junot-D%C3%ADaz/dp/1573226068

But Catcher in the Rye is a great and captivating story in its own right and doesn't really need to be replaced... though it would be great if schools taught edgier fiction these days.

    The article doesn't suggest any books to replace Catcher in the Rye

Scroll down, that's the third one on the list - but yes, I missed them at first glance too, looked like an ad block. I suppose in a way it is and ad block...

hah I must have missed that. Thanks for pointing it out!

I've always been very surprised that Catcher is assigned so regularly and Salinger's other WONDERFUL book 'Franny and Zoey' is on hardly any book lists.

Nice to see a writer who actually knows how to spell "cachet."

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