Schedule of Events

For my presentation in the Festival of Scholars, I will be giving a presentation on the history of the psychological criticism of J.D. Salinger's book The Catcher in the Rye, and on the future of its criticism in light of recent developments within the fields of psychoanalytic criticism and study. It will cover, in a general sense, the methods that Salinger's contemporary Freudian critics used to psychoanalyze the book and its characters, the as well as analyzing what it was about the book's form and content that allowed Freudian critics to view the book as a veritable goldmine for their own form of criticism. Additionally, I will also be providing examples, influenced by these critics, of how the character of Holden Caulfield could be psychoanalytically read. I will be describing the potential future of the book's criticism in light of its falling out of the contemporary sphere, doing so by presenting some of the basic concepts and current theories of the contemporary field of child-development psychology. I will also explore its applicability to the work by providing examples of how this sort of criticism might be used to analyze the character of Holden Caulfield, showing the book's potential for wide re-introduction into the mode of literary criticism.

Even as the heated debates over implementing Common Core standards into state curricula continue, states that are working on integrating the standards have been publishing some positive results. One of the most promising of these is what Nancy Vandervanter first named the Role-Audience-Format-Topic (RAFT) teaching model. This model includes a pedagogical exercise that teachers are using to fulfill the state standard requirement of “literacy development.” Comparing the English-Language Arts test scores of the pre-RAFT-ing Common Core students to those exposed to RAFT-ing in the more recent Common Core, I found that the latter student group is generating better test scores not only in English-Language Arts, but in other categories as well. This result, however, is perhaps of less lasting significance than RAFT-ing’s other benefits. These benefits include improving student understanding of our global-centric world, giving students consistent opportunities for and practice in creative thinking, and ensuring that students experience deeper and more meaningful engagement in the classroom. Even if the Common Core is ultimately replaced or removed altogether, it is safe to predict that the RAFT-ing method will remain a viable teaching technique.

Mississippi native and Nobel Prize for Literature recipient William Faulkner frequently grasped the attention of many with his distinctive writing style. Faulkner’s stream of consciousness technique fuels his 1930 novel As I Lay Dying, allowing the reader to fully enter into the mind and psyche of fifteen characters, creating a novel filled with uncertainty as the inner thoughts of the characters expose many different types of dialogue and vocabulary that blur the lines between characters. Similarly, Faulkner plays with convention of plot as he weaves in and out of time and place. We must take the clutter of images and recollections that each character gives us and assemble something of it ourselves. Ultimately, it is an open question as to whether the novel’s genre- and convention-bending features exhibit acts of devotion or a series of comedic scenes: Is the novel a satire of country life, or a serious and psychological journey of a family laying their mother to rest?

In 2009, the U.S. College Board decided to discontinue the advanced placement exam in Latin literature. Many agree with this decision, and cite various reasons why they do, reasons that almost always include the argument that there is no point in continuing to teach a “dead” language, especially one as “masculine” as Latin. Re-examining these and other causes for the marginalizing of Latin in academia, I discovered that although some objections to continuing the teaching of Latin many have validity, a surprising number of the traditional benefits inherent in the study of classical Latin could serve to strengthen some of the weaknesses in today’s academic curricula. These advantages are not limited to the learning of the language, but extend to the heart of the student learning process. They include, but are not limited to: improving logic and cognitive skills, practicing and improving self-discipline, internalizing the highly structured and organized paradigm of an inflected language, preparing for professional fields such as medicine and law, accessing vocabulary words in English and other languages through the study of Latin root words, and experiencing in-depth learning about Roman history and literature.

As evidenced by certain opposing views of veteran teachers Kelly Gallagher and Donalyn Miller, research indicates that there is no consistent answer to the problem of how best to address our nation’s reading problem. Researchers agree that most students are graduating from high schools without the necessary tools for achieving an acceptable reading level or even the desire to read. There is, also, some agreement about causes. They have not, however, reached a consensus on what to do about the issue. In examining various pedagogical approaches to teaching reading in U.S. high schools, I have learned that many promising pedagogies have been theorized and/or put into practice. These include methods devised by experienced teachers such as Lauren Gatti, who uses 19th century popular fiction to engage her students in an exploration of the canon in her 19th century American Literature classes. While preliminary research looks positive regarding such teaching methods, they have seldom been tested thoroughly enough to offer empirical across-the-board results. Selecting some of these best practices as teaching models would open up opportunities for a more standardized use of successful reading instruction techniques.