“Interpellation and the Second-Person Address: The Case of J.D. Salinger.”
Speaker(s): Chen Edelsburg (Postdoctoral Fellow, DLCL)
Chen Edelsburg (Postdoctoral Fellow, DLCL) will present an article draft titled “Interpellation and the Second-Person Address: The Case of J.D. Salinger.” Michaela Bronstein, Assistant Professor of English, will serve as Chen’s respondent. Here is what Chen has to say about her work:
“This article examines the author-reader relationship created in texts that address readers in the second person by a narrator who presents himself as the author. This is a common technique in postmodern writing, as it challenges the relationship between fiction and reality. The article treats this narratological problem with psycho-Marxist tools, by analyzing the second-person address as a kind of interpellation, following Louis Althusser’s conceptualization and Slavoj Žižek’s development of the term. This conceptual framework allows for a detailed analysis of the reader's ambivalent struggle for a sense of subjectivation vis-à-vis the author/narrator, as well as a better understanding of the ideological meanings of his/her address to the reader (both the implied reader and the actual one) – a subject that has been overlooked in traditional narratology and reader-response theory. The method hereby proposed is demonstrated in the second part of the article on two of J. D. Salinger’s works. The first is The Catcher in the Rye, a novel that very successfully uses a general ‘you’ to interpellate its readers into different subject positions; and the second is Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymore: An Introduction, a book replete with trauma in both its themes and structure. The latter text addresses its readers in ways that are meant to miss them, thus creating an unbridgeable split between the narratee and the actual reader. These addresses fail to interpellate the readers into the idealized readers of the work by using ‘traumatic interpellations.’”
Chen’s draft is attached.
IN SUMMARY:
WHO: Chen Edlesburg and Michaela Bronstein
WHAT: "Interpellation and the Second-Person Address: The Case of J.D. Salinger"
WHEN: Tuesday, March 5, 6-8 pm
WHERE: Pigott 216
As always, dinner and drinks will be provided. We hope to see you there!