Abstract:
The transformation of industrial city into modern city entailed the change in the dominant nature of the city from the site of production to that of consumption. In the postmodern city، the trend accelerated، or better to say، heightened into "mass consumption". Consumption is no longer considered a routine and banal activity. It is rather a consciously and unconsciously affected affair that is engaged in continuous dialogue with the most vital issues of contemporary urban life such as identity، aspirations، class status and culture. This is the context into which Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye was born and thrived; therefore، it should be conceived in the same context.
Machine summary:
But it was the economic boom of the era after the Second World War– with its expanding the ability to consume to the whole society, even the lower classes and especially to the young, and with its ascribing the notion of identity to that of consumption–that opened up new domains in patterns of mass consumption and the ways of thinking about them.
One can find the formulation of the cultural and social implications of mass consumption in the theories of the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, who is for a great part indebted to the theories of Marx and Veblen in his social criticism, and whose theories seem most pertinent in the study of these implications in The Catcher in the Rye. For that matter, it would be helpful to the task of this section to start with a general introduction to the history of the idea of consumption to find the mainsprings of Bourdieu's social theory.
That is to say, Holden is conscious of the rules of "demand and supply" in the market-place of the culture of consumption, and knows that it is the demand of the audience that, in part, turns Ernie and his art into consumer commodity.
Even a novel like The Catcher in the Rye, with its deep critique of social classification and industrialization of culture, itself becomes one of the most profitable cultural commodities in the market-place; and its critics feel the urge to respect the taste of the mass consumer in order to retrieve their cultural capital.