Holden Caulfield’s Manhattan: adolescent landscapes

This is a project, in multiple parts, analyzing how landscapes and spaces are constructed in adolescence. This paper claims that literary landscapes, especially in adolescent literature, allow readers to understand adolescent interaction with physical and digital geography – even in literature published before the rise of digital social media. I use J.D. Salinger’s 1951 The Catcher in the Rye to consider how the past and the present become obscured through narrative about place. The main piece of this project is an interactive, mobile, and social tour through Manhattan that takes its users to many places that Holden Caulfield visits in his story. This allows the users to learn how Holden’s journey affects today’s adolescents and their relationships with physical space and the social internet – and how those landscapes affect one another.M.A.Includes bibliographical reference