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This chapter argues that privacy is a ‘foundational’ good to which the United States and similar nations should have a substantive commitment as they do to personal freedom and equality. Foundational goods are the resources typical persons will need as bases for self-respect and to enjoy core liberties. For the sake of foundational goods, including physical and informational privacy, liberal societies properly educate, incentivize, nudge, and where necessary, coerce.People should be taught to value others' privacy and their own. When people abandon privacies typically needed for self-respect, reputation, confidential relationships and other forms of flourishing, it is time to consider mandating the privacy that is unwanted or to which people have become indifferent. Because both opportunities for privacy and the actual experience of privacy are vitally important, privacy cannot be left solely to the realm of waiver-eligible free choices. Not all privacy rights are best considered alienable. We need to extend debates -- common in feminist literatures -- about balancing freedom from unwanted rights of privacy on the one hand with duties of privacy on the other. Privacy theorists should add to their routine agendas contextual explorations of the extent to which varied forms of privacy are legitimately imposed by law even in the face of unwelcoming targets and beneficiaries. A central question for privacy scholars is this: when is coercing privacy by state mandate required by background political ideals, and when does coercing privacy contradict background ideals? While coercing privacy is highly desirable from a liberal democratic point of view, it is also potentially dangerous. Ultimately society must constrain the power to mandate privacy, not only to promote ideals of responsible freedom, but also to promote ideals of responsible government.

Chapter Three begins with analysis of the function of the American West in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). The chapter goes on to reveal that Salinger’s literary depictions of Nature are significantly informed by the Americanised translations of Chinese and Japanese philosophical texts that he was studying from as early as 1946. The chapter uncovers the sources of translated Taoism to which Salinger was exposed, revealing that the translators Salinger mentions by name in his literary fiction all markedly foreground the role of Nature in their ‘American versions’ of classical Chinese and Japanese texts. Chapter Three then applies this research in close readings of two of Salinger’s later long stories, ‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’ (1955) and ‘Seymour: An Introduction’ (1959), and offers a new reading of The Catcher in the Rye. These ecocritical readings expose the substantial influence of the ‘American versions’ of Taoist texts that Salinger studied on his literary depictions of an infinite and ecological Nature.

This chapter examines J. D. Salinger's most famous character, Holden Caulfield, in The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Holden is a holy rebel who represents the principle of Good, and a quick-tongued urban trickster who mocks his own conventional society and never wants to grow up. He was also portrayed as an embodiment of the search for American freedom and authenticity. The novel features various literary references, including Eustacia Vye in Return of the Native (1878), Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa (1937), Ring Lardner's satires, Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet (1597), Emily Dickinson, The Great Gatsby (1925), A Farewell to Arms (1929), and Robert Burns's Comin Thro' the Rye (1782)—the novel's most obvious literary reference, from which its title was derived.

This chapter offers a brief sketch of a selection of twentieth-century precursor or foundational trauma texts, including J. D. Salinger’s ‘For Esmé – with Love and Squalor’, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel and some of Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam narratives. The chapter analyses some of the key paradigms that these trauma texts helped to construct, including extreme chronological and narrating fragmentation, formal employment of repetition, the radical decentring of narrating subjectivity, and the belated revelations of traumatic incidents. A contrast is drawn in this chapter between the originally shocking effects of these deliberately disjointed narratives, and trauma texts from later in the century that employ similar, but by now derivative, representational practices.

Round Three features a detailed study of three works by three major American authors who not only make game shows central plot devices but also create familial relationships among the game show producers and contestants, transforming all conflicts over the game show into family conflicts. These “quiz-show families” blend the most intimate relationship, the family, with the least intimate kind of human interaction, the game show, in order to interrogate how people connect with each other (or not) in an image culture. J. D. Salinger’s Glass Family saga, David Foster Wallace’s story “Little Expressionless Animals,” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Magnolia exploit the insincere nature of the game show to make sincere assertions about everyone’s similarities as wounded humans. Where one might expect these prophets of sincerity to find nothing but cynical grins and cheesy puns, they instead use game shows to affirm their commitment to radical authenticity by finding moments of compassion and transcendence in the emptiest of places, offering a glimpse of a new way of living in the Land of the Game Show.