Il giovane Holden: del disagio scolastico, dell’adolescenza. Critica della società e pensiero autonomo

Abstract

This article revisits Jerome Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, arguing
that it offers much food for thought from a pedagogical perspective, particularly from a critical pedagogy perspective. The novel’s main themes are reviewed, arguing that it contains elements for a theory of adolescence and scholastic distress, as well as for a critique of society. It thus highlights how one of the novel’s central themes implicitly lies in the proposition of autonomous thought, free from the approval of the social group, and how this work represents a valid example of opposition to the conformism and social pathologies of a society that, even in the 1950s in the United States, contained aspetects of today’s advanced capitalist mass society.