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Hamlet, The Catcher in the Rye, and the Age-Old Story of Teen Angst
by Paul Thomson on Apr 7, 2010
Despite what marketers would have you believe, angst is not just a gelled, chiseled, perfectly unkempt product of the Twilight phenomenon. Holden Caulfield is king of twentieth-century angst, and he was kicking around with a buzz cut back in the 1950’s. Søren Kierkegaard set the philosophical bar for angst in the nineteenth century and managed to do so while wearing a top hat. And who can forget Prince Hamlet, the skull-carrying, pantaloon-wearing original angst-er of the European canon?Kierkegaard, of course, looked at angst from a strictly Western, Christian viewpoint, but literary figures like Holden and Hamlet have a much more universal register. (That is, unless you're tired of all the agonizing and hesitancy, in which case you should go read To Kill a Mockingbird for some of Scout's shoot-first-ask-questions-later wisdom.) In fact, despite the potential language barrier (Hamlet: "what / is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me"; Holden: "That guy Morrow was about...Read More >>
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by Paul Thomson
The word “wooing” doesn’t get used very much anymore. Not just because the word itself sounds outdated, but because the relationship scene has changed a tad over the last hundred plus years.
Newfound social flexibility has taken a lot of the ritual out of love, which is great if you don’t want to be exchanged to the neighboring villager for a goat but less great when you’re trying to figure out how long to wait before you call someone back. Or what to say when you do call. Or whether there’s anything to call about in the first place. OR, dare we speculate, if the...
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