Presenter(s)

Abbey Sullivan

Comments

10:40-11:00, Kennedy Union 312

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Description

President Eisenhower’s 1953 UN speech, “Atoms for Peace,” proudly declares the mounting concerns of the atomic age. He demands that the global community accept the “significant facts” of their midcentury existence: the dominating threat of global, nuclear annihilation. This pervasive anxiety, reinforced by early Cold War political maneuverings like the US containment policy, struck the American people with “Cold War fatalism,” or a prevailing sense of alienation and submission in the earliest years of the Cold War, wrought by the new atomic age. The midcentury literary scene embodied such fatalism, as well, creating a sect of nuclear first responders who grappled with new cultural questions and worries. High among them is J. D. Salinger, author of the 1951 classic The Catcher in the Rye, whose later works captured the necessary acceptance of fate in order to survive in the new, dichotomous, nuclear world. My paper follows Salinger’s character, Seymour Glass, and his appearances across three different works – “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” (1948) Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction (1959), and Franny and Zooey (1961). Seymour is the eldest sibling of the cerebral Glass family, both a brilliant poet and highly spiritual, and commits suicide while on vacation with his wife. I argue that, through Seymour, Salinger displays the consequences of failing to adhere to Cold War fatalism; by embodying themes like artistic and spiritual purity, Seymour was incompatible with his historical moment and took his own life. By reading Seymour Glass as inextricably bound to the Cold War era, Salinger takes part in a larger Cold War literature conversation, illuminating other avenues of literary study while decentering The Catcher in the Rye and its excessive critical attention.

Publication Date

4-23-2025

Project Designation

Graduate Research

Primary Advisor

Liz K. Hutter, Tom Morgan, Tereza M. Szeghi

Primary Advisor's Department

English

Keywords

Stander Symposium, College of Arts and Sciences

Institutional Learning Goals

Scholarship

J. D. Salinger and the Cold War: A Case Study in American Cold War Fatalism

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