Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Salinger, J. D. - Helen Weinberg （essay date 1987）

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Helen Weinberg （essay date 1987）

SOURCE: “J. D. Salinger's Holden and Seymour and the Spiritual Activist Hero,” in J. D. Salinger, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, pp. 63-79.

[In the following essay, Weinberg discusses post-Freudian criticism of Salinger's fiction and offers an analysis of Salinger's innovative literary techniques and the psychological and metaphysical motivations of his protagonists in The Catcher in the Rye and “Seymour: An Introduction.”]

Mary McCarthy attacks J. D. Salinger's work as sentimental and narcissistic. One expects coolheadedness, tough-mindedness, from Miss McCarthy, and this is of course what she is giving her reader in assailing Salinger's sentimentality; but her view of his narcissism is not tough-minded. To criticize Salinger's work on psychological rather than literary grounds seems to me too arbitrary and simpleminded a method of judging his representation of...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Anne Marple （review date 18 September 1961）
   2. J. D. O'Hara （essay date Winter 1963-1964）
   3. Bernice and Sanford Goldstein （essay date Autumn 1966）
   4. Kerry McSweeney （essay date Spring 1978）
   5. Edwin Haviland Miller （essay date Winter 1982）
   6. Sanford Pinsker （essay date Winter 1986）
   7. Max F. Schulz （essay date 1987）
   8. Helen Weinberg （essay date 1987）
   9. John Wenke （essay date 1987）
   10. Terry Teachout （essay date September 1987）
   11. Joyce Rowe （essay date 1991）
   12. Peter Shaw （essay date 1991）
   13. Pamela Steinle （essay date 1991）
   14. Susan K. Mitchell （essay date December 1992）
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. J. D. Salinger