Banned books, what do you think about Catcher in the Rye?

Page 1 of 2 [ 24 posts ]  Go to page 1, 2  Next

pawelk1986
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 2 Apr 2010
Age: 38
Gender: Male
Posts: 2,901
Location: Wroclaw, Poland

03 May 2016, 3:01 pm

I studying library science,
I have one lecture on censorship in the media and literature.
Ms. porofesor selected several books that were censored in the West or with us in Poland, the former Eastern Bloc.

We could choose a book that we have read and summarize. Unfortunately, I was not the first class, because then I was sick, I had a cold, and all the cool books, such as those by Orwell, Solzhenitsyn or Catcher in the Rye was already occupied by others, I was only one title
Sylvia Plath, The Bell :(
(I must read it there is no other option :( )

I talked about it with my mom, my mom said that the damage that The Catcher in the Rye is already taken, because in her opinion in retrospect seems to be the main character of this novel is a little autistic, and that this book could appeal to me,.
I was reading this book in high school actually only in fragments, classes of Polish language and literature, I learned just enough to pass the test :D

Because I have to admit that I did not like too much of classes of languages or literature, I preferred the History and Civics :D



slenkar
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 25 Apr 2014
Gender: Male
Posts: 1,146
Location: here

03 May 2016, 3:39 pm

I think it's subject matter is too adult for high schoolers.
Sell it in book stores as much as you want but don't make it required reading!



TheAP
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 28 Dec 2014
Age: 26
Gender: Female
Posts: 20,314
Location: Canada

03 May 2016, 4:36 pm

I don't really get what's so brilliant about it, TBH. It's interesting, but it doesn't really have a plot, just him going and doing random stuff. But I guess I'm missing something.



pawelk1986
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 2 Apr 2010
Age: 38
Gender: Male
Posts: 2,901
Location: Wroclaw, Poland

03 May 2016, 5:05 pm

slenkar wrote:
I think it's subject matter is too adult for high schoolers.
Sell it in book stores as much as you want but don't make it required reading!


Well it was required in High School here in Poland but i did not remember very much of it, i just read some of it because teacher told my to do, but i think i just read it just read for my just for me during vacation. I heard that it was very good one.



slenkar
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 25 Apr 2014
Gender: Male
Posts: 1,146
Location: here

03 May 2016, 5:41 pm

I read it in my early twenties and enjoyed it, I think if I read it as a 14 or 16 year old it would have influenced me



Kraichgauer
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 12 Apr 2010
Gender: Male
Posts: 48,617
Location: Spokane area, Washington state.

03 May 2016, 8:42 pm

The Catcher In The Rye has gotten the rep for being the favored reading material for psycho shooters.
As far as banned books go, my favorite is William Burroughs' Naked Lunch. It had been banned in Boston for obscenities and homosexual themes, but literary giants had testified on Burroughs' behalf, and got the decision reversed.


_________________
-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer


DancingCorpse
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 12 Dec 2015
Gender: Male
Posts: 1,532

03 May 2016, 8:42 pm

Absolutely enchanting, it's just so goddamn real, this guy Holden is a marvel of a guy to try to figure out, he's so freaking funny and he seems a good guy but he is inconsistent and a little unhinged and has no clue what he's doing. I love when Salinger develops tangents and we can see the thought process more, it's such a strange and fractured tale, nothing incredible happens but that's the beauty, the whole piece just radiates a peculiar energy without really taking you anywhere except in a disturbed teenager's brain. The museum section I always get really sad about because it's so wonderfully observed from Holden's eyes and associations.



pawelk1986
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 2 Apr 2010
Age: 38
Gender: Male
Posts: 2,901
Location: Wroclaw, Poland

04 May 2016, 6:20 am

Kraichgauer wrote:
The Catcher In The Rye has gotten the rep for being the favored reading material for psycho shooters.
As far as banned books go, my favorite is William Burroughs' Naked Lunch. It had been banned in Boston for obscenities and homosexual themes, but literary giants had testified on Burroughs' behalf, and got the decision reversed.


As regards Polish This is what I told Ms professor is under communism in Poland in censored books were George Orwell and those who consented to the good name of socialism, like those by Solzhenitsyn or Boris Pasternak :)
Problems were also publications that publish guidebooks about Poland or atlases, maps can not be very accurate because it could be used by the imperialists means by NATO forces, and now NATO is also Poland irony of history :-)

The official censorship in Poland ended with the fall of communism, but the aspirations of censorship are still present in my country, especially by the Catholic Church to which I belong. One Cardinal said that Harry Potter promotes Satanism and because of this it should not be available for Polish childrens :D



Fnord
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 6 May 2008
Gender: Male
Posts: 60,939
Location:      

04 May 2016, 6:31 am

Top 10 Banned Books:

"Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley (1932)
"The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck (1939)
"Tropic of Cancer" by Henry Miller (1934)
"Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
"The Satanic Verses" by Salman Rushdie (1988)
"The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Stephen Chobsky (1999)
"Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe (1958)
"American Psycho" by Brett Easton Ellis (1991)
"The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka (1915)
"Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

"Catcher In The Rye" doesn't even make the list.



underwater
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 10 Sep 2015
Age: 47
Gender: Female
Posts: 1,904
Location: Hibernating

04 May 2016, 6:49 am

Well, The Bell Jar is not happy reading. Perhaps it'll help to focus on what about is was so controversial in the past, and how this was based on communist ideology - I am assuming it was banned in Poland.

Is it possible that it was banned because communist ideology had no time for defeatism, and that the powers that be decided it was unhealthy reading for young minds? Or some other reason?



pawelk1986
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 2 Apr 2010
Age: 38
Gender: Male
Posts: 2,901
Location: Wroclaw, Poland

04 May 2016, 8:25 am

underwater wrote:
Well, The Bell Jar is not happy reading. Perhaps it'll help to focus on what about is was so controversial in the past, and how this was based on communist ideology - I am assuming it was banned in Poland.

Is it possible that it was banned because communist ideology had no time for defeatism, and that the powers that be decided it was unhealthy reading for young minds? Or some other reason?


This book just was not banned in Poland, the first Polish edition was published in 1975 (the original American edition, was issued in 1963)
Professor of specially selected a book which aroused controversy in the West or in the former Eastern Bloc, just from what I read The Bell Jar, did not arouse such controversy in Poland, was finally released, after the official state publishing house specializing in literature and fiction.

But from what I know it was challenged in America and Britain.

From what I know a lot of books, especially the avant-garde, was published in Communist Poland, if they were more or less the line of the Communist Party :-)

In particular, if aroused opposition, the conservative part of Polish society, or how they were loudly criticized by our church officials :mrgreen:



underwater
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 10 Sep 2015
Age: 47
Gender: Female
Posts: 1,904
Location: Hibernating

04 May 2016, 8:54 am

pawelk1986 wrote:
underwater wrote:
Well, The Bell Jar is not happy reading. Perhaps it'll help to focus on what about is was so controversial in the past, and how this was based on communist ideology - I am assuming it was banned in Poland.

Is it possible that it was banned because communist ideology had no time for defeatism, and that the powers that be decided it was unhealthy reading for young minds? Or some other reason?


This book just was not banned in Poland, the first Polish edition was published in 1975 (the original American edition, was issued in 1963)
Professor of specially selected a book which aroused controversy in the West or in the former Eastern Bloc, just from what I read The Bell Jar, did not arouse such controversy in Poland, was finally released, after the official state publishing house specializing in literature and fiction.

But from what I know it was challenged in America and Britain.

From what I know a lot of books, especially the avant-garde, was published in Communist Poland, if they were more or less the line of the Communist Party :-)

In particular, if aroused opposition, the conservative part of Polish society, or how they were loudly criticized by our church officials :mrgreen:



I didn't know that the Bell Jar caused such controversy. Did your professor mean banned books or just controversial ones?

In general I think it is more a book for the specially interested, i.e. depressed young women or people who see it a roman a clef for Sylvia Plath's life and poetry.



eric76
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 31 Aug 2012
Gender: Male
Posts: 10,660
Location: In the heart of the dust bowl

04 May 2016, 9:59 am

TheAP wrote:
I don't really get what's so brilliant about it, TBH. It's interesting, but it doesn't really have a plot, just him going and doing random stuff. But I guess I'm missing something.


I didn't really see the point of it either. Maybe the point was that there was no point.



pawelk1986
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 2 Apr 2010
Age: 38
Gender: Male
Posts: 2,901
Location: Wroclaw, Poland

04 May 2016, 1:54 pm

I must admit that despite studying library science, I do not like to read, that is basically like and even much, but not fiction, with the exception of science fiction :-)
I really like historical novels, or anything at all which has any basis in fact.
I also like the book telling about other cultures and travel. Like Julies I must admit that despite studying library science, I do not like to read, that is basically like and even much, but not fiction, with the exception of science fiction :-)
I really like historical novels, or anything at all which has any basis in fact.
I also like the book telling about other cultures and travel like Julies Verne :D

We in Poland have also one author of i very love it's Alfred Szklarski
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Sz ... _Wilmowski
who had a very interesting biography, namely, he was born in a family of Polish American community, he was the child of Polish immigrant and returned to Polish with his mother and father in 1926, after Poland regained its independence :-)
He wrote a series of travel books about a teenage boy who, along with his father trained as a geographer traveled almost all over the world, catching wild animals for Zoos and Circuses.
From what I know it was, moreover, based in part on facts.
As the main character is the son of expatriate who had to leave Poland, and in fact the Russian part of it, because Poland was then under occupation, and his father was a hero dispute with the Russian tsar :D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomek_Wilmowski

I also like Karl May, Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, but generały i did not like fiction, i think it's because my Asperger :D



Kraichgauer
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 12 Apr 2010
Gender: Male
Posts: 48,617
Location: Spokane area, Washington state.

04 May 2016, 4:57 pm

Fnord wrote:
Top 10 Banned Books:

"Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley (1932)
"The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck (1939)
"Tropic of Cancer" by Henry Miller (1934)
"Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
"The Satanic Verses" by Salman Rushdie (1988)
"The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Stephen Chobsky (1999)
"Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe (1958)
"American Psycho" by Brett Easton Ellis (1991)
"The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka (1915)
"Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

"Catcher In The Rye" doesn't even make the list.


Slaughterhouse-Five, and The Metamorphosis were banned somewhere? Why? Those are two of my favorite books!


_________________
-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer


mr_bigmouth_502
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 12 Dec 2013
Age: 31
Gender: Non-binary
Posts: 7,028
Location: Alberta, Canada

06 May 2016, 5:12 pm

"The Catcher in the Rye", "The Satanic Verses", and "Lolita" are all on my personal bucket list. Actually, quite a bit of my literary bucket list is stuff that's been banned or is otherwise transgressive or "edgelordy".


_________________
Every day is exactly the same...