If they want people to have more babies, then maybe they should fix the problems that cause people to not want kids. Nah! Let’s just force pregnancies!
There have been a lot of articles in press about TikTok being responsible for the rise of interest in literature by young people, as the article also mentions.
At the end, it probably was either a planted story, or memetic evolution triggered by one journalist noticing something in their environment that wasn’t a general trend.
So I think there are ways that you can do it to kill the flavor of books, but the core premise that some of those books are no longer appropriate for children as written is absolutely real. They're not capable of reading critically and recognizing that some of the characterizations aren't appropriate. They just absorb. And if you did want them to engage with "this isn't right", you need to be more direct with it and deliberately make it part of the story.
Adult books IDK. I'm not really a big classics reader generally, because while historical relevance is important, I just don't think a lot of the themes translate to modern culture. I'm kind of torn on reading them in literature class for the same reasons. They do provide examples of literary techniques that most modern stuff doesn't really do, so I can sort of understand using them to demonstrate allegory and metaphor, etc, but at the same time, very few people enjoy reading them and the actual messages that don't really apply today also don't get through anyways. If you read more modern stuff you might actually engage people with reading, but updating curriculums is a slog and a half.
They do provide examples of literary techniques that most modern stuff doesn't really do, so I can sort of understand using them to demonstrate allegory and metaphor, etc, but at the same time, very few people enjoy reading them and the actual messages that don't really apply today also don't get through anyways.
As an old English major, I agree that the "canon" is probably larger than it needs to be, and educators generally do a piss poor job of accepting that excellent works of literature continue to be written while the length of a school year does not change. I'll stick up for a heavy dose of the classics though. Even more than the techniques, which absolutely are present in modern literature, Shakespeare and Dickens and Melville provide a shared set of norms and expectations and feed into references and provide a vocabulary for conversation and even subconscious engagement with newer works of lit and drama.
In a lot of ways they ARE the historical context of English literature, and to that extent, yes, you should cram some of them into the brains of teenagers. Not so many as we do now, and the point is well taken that newer works can engage more readily, but school is the right time to have people read these works and to discuss why some parts are relevant, and to take a moment to explain why other parts were relevant. I'd love to see a curriculum that includes some "family tree" type stuff for themes and techniques and shows how writers have more- or less-consciously adapted and built on the DNA of previous works. Kind of a "Huck Finn begets Holden Caulfield begets Harry Potter" kind of thing. Nothing could be worse for engagement than a pure chronological lesson plan for the year.
“Wilson has admitted that she would not write one of her books, published in 2005, today.
Love Lessons is about a 14-year-old girl, Prue, who falls in love with an art teacher who partly reciprocates. They kiss and he admits that he loves her, too.
Wilson told the Guardian in a recent interview: “It’s so different now …”
😐 That was no more appropriate in 2005 than it is now you moron! We aren’t talking 150 years ago… that was 18 years ago!
In other words, it was eight years AFTER Mary Kay LeTourneau pled guilty to that shit…
For kid lit, absolutely. Maintain "scholarly editions" for academics and curious adults, and maybe even indicate somewhere on the copyright or title page that the edition people are reading differs from the original, but if a book is both important and problematic, then yeah, there's no reason to take the hurtful, insensitive themes and images in some of them and say, "here, junior, this is what the adults in your life think you need to internalize."
In general, I'm more for retiring dated children's literature than revising it, authorial intent and all, but some of the great touchstones would have more value in revised form than as relics. As a parent, discussions about problematic media eventually become unavoidable if you want to responsibly engage with the world, but I don't want to give a younger kid of bunch of mixed messages.
We want to be progressive and we live in a society that pretends to be rad and chill with everything. However we feel the need to censor and modify everything that “offends” us or doesnt fit our vision of the world.
Even the people who seem to be in favor of it all seem to be talking about how they’ll write going forward.
With that said, editing older works to fit different contexts isn’t new at all. I remember reading my grandmother’s collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and cable companies routinely overdub curse words in movies and cut out sex scenes. Different edits for different audiences. It’s weird (it’s not weird) how we only start getting pissy about it when it comes to editing out slurs and stuff.
I don’t think anyone’s arguing for completely banning books that use shitty stereotypes and nasty racial language. The “unabridged” versions, much like the “theatrical releases” of movies, aren’t being thrown into a giant shredder. If someone wants to read an anti-semetic rant by Dahl, it’s out there. But we’ve never once at any point in the past gave two shits about editing content to make different editions for different people, and I haven’t heard an argument about why we should care when it comes to this specific version of the practice.
I tend to agree with this. Why not have multiple editions of a book available, one that is the original and the other that has received some edits to reflect modern values?
I’ve been reading HP Lovecraft recently. A lot of his stories are horrendously racist, and I’ve found that more uncomfortable to read than the actual horror. I’d have quite happily purchased a version (rather than downloading a free ebook) that had received a light touch of editing, of the kind that removed the racist slurs while keeping everything else intact. I genuinely can’t see that the actual story or vibes of “The Rats in the Walls” would have been any different if the cat had a different name.
I also find it bizarre how many people get pissy about sensitivity readers being “censorship”, while also insisting that editors are absolutely essential to making a book as good as it can be. Surely if a sensitivity reader is “censoring” a book by giving some suggestions (not orders or demands) on how to make a book better, then an editor is also “censoring” a book when they do the exact same thing? The truth is authors have always had fellow authors, beta readers and editors who read their work, react to it, and give suggestions on how to improve it. A wise author should seek out feedback, and getting feedback from people who actually know the subject matter is pretty damned valuable.
I’m not really making an argument, but describing something I’ve heard and seems like a reasonable point to consider: One potential issue with “cleaning up” stuff like HP Lovecraft is that a lot of his horror is, in fact, horror about race. So cleaning it up would interact weirdly with that topic — would it mask the racial nature of it by making it less overt? Would it make it a different story? Or would it still basically be intact, but less immediately distracting, just because our modern ear recoils when we read certain words? (I don’t know which of these it would be; it probably varies depending on the story)
I actually think the stories would be stronger without the racial elements, because a common theme in many of the stories I’ve read so far (bearing in mind I’ve only read about 25% so far) has been the discovery of something hideous and bestial within the human. I’ve actually not interpreted the horror as being exclusively about race, because Lovecraft assumes all characters are white unless explicitly stated otherwise (as most authors do), and ghastly heritage is not reserved only for the non-white characters. I suppose one could argue that it’s intended to be a metaphor for discovering that one’s “bloodline” isn’t as pure as they believe (I wonder if Lovecraft had, or feared he had, non-white ancestors?), and that’s where the racial horror comes into it.
The interesting thing is that so many of the stories I’ve read so far don’t even mention race (except in passing), which makes racism stand out even more in the stories it suddenly appears in. The “what if we aren’t who we think we are?” and “what knowledge would drive us mad if we learned it?” themes stand just fine on their own in the stories where race isn’t mentioned; and these themes would be maintained if the racist slurs were edited out of other stories. Lovecraft’s horror is cosmic and existential, and is more so when presented as racially neutral, because it leaves all humans equally powerless in the face of the unnameable.
shrugs That’s just my interpretation, anyway, which is of course 100% subjective. I may change my mind when I get to Lovecraft’s later works. The dude is absolutely an awful racist, and my experience with bigots is they become more extreme, and less cautious about hiding their hatred, as time goes on. So we’ll see. But as it stands, the stories I’ve read so far would not change significantly if the racism was removed, and they’d be better reads without that enormous distraction.
theguardian.com
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