You’ve got a couple of balls in the air right now, I know, and like most of us, you may not think of yourself as naturally adept at juggling. Both projects are challenging, and the final project may seem especially complex (and unlike anything you’ve ever done before).  But I promise you: you can handle them.

Remember: for the “Annotated Rye” project, you’re focusing on a primary text that somehow speaks to a postwar discourse you want to explore.  For the moment, then, you’re looking closely at that text in isolation, using Rob Pope’s questions as prompts for observation and analysis (and, uh, annotation). But at the same time you know, in the back of your mind, that for the final project, you’ll be putting this text into conversation with Catcher and thinking about both texts in relation to that same discourse. So as you work on the first project, stay open to insights you might have that will be useful for the second. You can work on both projects at once, or you can write down those insights in a notebook and save them for later.

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If you still don’t know what discourse you want to explore (or what to name it or how to narrow it): consider my starter list on p. 2 of the “Annotated Rye” spec sheet, poke around in Graham, Pinsker, Olson, or Filreis (see the Catcher’s Toolkit: Secondary Resources), and/or do some additional reading and research of your own.

Once you’ve decided (or at least provisionally decided) on a discourse: find a secondary source that gives you a “seat-of-the-pants” overview of that discourse and/or offers you a firmer grounding in it or a framework for thinking about it.  That way, you won’t have to talk out your…er…through your hat and find yourself making gross, unsupported generalizations about the discourse of X in postwar America.  Lesko, for instance, might be a serviceable secondary source for many of you. She focuses primarily on the discourses of adolescence and “containment,” but she also has a fair amount to say about the discourse of homosexuality (and of sexual conformity and of the regulation or “containment” of sexuality generally), the discourse of “identity” (especially psychological discourse about identity, including gender identity), the discourses of “rebellion” and conformity, the discourse of race (especially in relation to the discourse of rebellion: see pp. 126-128), and so on.  Apart from Lesko, some of the selected secondary resources I’ve listed in the Catcher’s Toolkit, starting with Curry, might give you a better idea of how issues of race, homosexuality, domesticity, and psychology were framed in the 1950s.  And of course you can research on your own, too...

Next, try to enumerate some of your discourse’s “truths” or “tropes” or clichés or “confident characterizations”—some of its underlying assumptions, the things it takes for granted.  (Review Lesko and use her as a model.)  If your discourse were a genre, what would be some of its defining elements or characteristics?
 
If you weren’t ready before, then you should be ready now to find a relevant primary text:  a text that “engages” your chosen discourse somehow, a text that helped construct or cement a way of speaking and thinking about your subject, or that (at the very least) demonstrates something about how your subject was typically spoken or thought about in its day.  (It might even be a primary text that’s mentioned or discussed in your secondary source.  Lesko, for example, cites influential texts by Erik Erikson, Arthur Schlesinger, Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, and William H. Whyte, as well as movies like Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, King Creole, and so on. Several of those texts—or relevant excerpts from them—are available in the Catcher’s Toolkit.)  Beyond that: explore the Prelinger Archive; explore Filreis’s Literature and Culture of the American 1950s (both in the Catcher’s Toolkit); find other resources on the web or in the library.  (What search terms or keywords would you use; what other topics related to your discourse might yield results and help you find good texts?)

Again: that text could be a film, a commercial, a sitcom episode, a print ad, a popular song, a pamphlet or instructional manual, a magazine or newspaper article, a speech read into the congressional record, a medical study, a legal brief … English Studies takes a broad view of “texts” these days.  As Sara Mills puts it in Discourse (St. Martins, 1998):

The study of discourse does not differentiate between those texts which are designated as literary and those which are designated as non-literary, although discourse theorists are keenly aware of the institutionalized differences that exist between the two sets of texts. History texts are [commonly regarded as] privileged in their relation to truth, for example; autobiographical writings are privileged in terms of their supposed authenticity in relation to an authorial voice; and literary texts have a complex relation to both truth and value, on the one hand being seen as providing a “truth” about the human condition, and yet doing so within a fictional and therefore “untrue” form. However, for the discussion of the construction, say, of discourses of femininity and masculinity, [discourse theorists believe] it is possible to discuss literary texts alongside other texts, such as works of history and autobiography, and even more ephemeral texts, such as cookery books, advice manuals and so on, in order to reveal similarities these texts display across generic boundaries. Discourse is therefore useful in that it can allow us to analyse similarities across a range of texts as the products of a particular set of power/knowledge relations.

The main thing is to choose a text that’s rich and complex enough to give you something to talk about.  And you may not know whether that’s so until you’ve begun “interrogating” it, using the final three clusters of Rob Pope’s questions as your initial prompts.  (Remember the “I Am An American” public service announcement we discussed in class? Who would have thought, until we started asking questions about it, just how and deeply and complexly it was embedded not just in discourses of patriotism, nationalism, and national identity, but of American exceptionalism and American virtue, of tolerance and “diversity,” of racism and anti-racism, of xenophobia, of social class, and so on?)

Don’t get so caught up in answering Pope’s questions that you forget to use them to help you “read” your text (and to think of other questions).  They’re a means to an end, not an end in itself.  You always want to be asking yourself: how can answering these questions help me say something about how my text is “constructing” its subject or contributing to the discourse about that subject? (Pope's first set of questions are preliminaries; they’re meant to help you reflect on your own historical situatedness, your own position as a reader/scholar/investigator.)

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Now, thinking ahead: for the “Historicizing Catcher” Project, you’ll be putting your primary text into conversation with Catcher, “reading” it in conjunction with Catcher, discussing both texts in relation to your chosen discourse, trying to elucidate how they are both part of the same discourse. 

In New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (St. Martin’s, 1998), John Brannigan reiterates the basic principle that New Historicists “us[e] literary texts as equal sources with other texts in the attempt to describe and examine the linguistic, cultural, social and political fabric of the past in greater detail” (12).  “Such analyses,” he says, “trace the connections between seemingly disparate texts so as to reveal the presence of a discourse, a discourse which inevitably shapes, as much as it is shaped by, its own society” (136-7).  For example: Mary Kingsley’s memoir Travels in West Africa “can be read with [Joseph] Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as part of a [late 19th- and early 20th-century] discourse which represents the African, or even the idea of the African, in relation to European norms” (137).  Exhibits of and about Africans at turn-of-the-century World’s Fairs and international expositions were part of that same discourse.  So were the labels and packaging designs of certain consumer goods.  So were geography textbooks and articles in early anthropology journals.  The “connections” between those “seemingly disparate texts” are different in each case, but they’re there. 

Here are some basic preparatory tasks for the “Historicizing Catcher” project:

• Inventory all potentially relevant passages in Catcher, no matter how long or short, how closely or how tangentially related.  (Related to the discourse that you’re studying, that is.)  Once you have a comprehensive list, you can “weed” it, considering which two or three passages will be most useful for your purposes.
• For both Catcher and your other primary text, ask yourself this: how do you see your chosen discourse in it?  For example: what kinds of truths or tropes or confident characterizations about X does Catcher and/or your text generate, establish, invoke, allude to, take for granted, or reinforce (or conversely, what kinds of truths or tropes or confident characterizations does it contest, trouble, or dispute—or something in between)?

Off you go now…