The US-Canadian professor Justin E. H. Smith is a new name to me. In fact when I first started reading this essay I thought it was by a woman named "Justine H. Smith." No matter. Don't think of it as long, consider it substantial.
I will say that I do not support anything so simplistic as “distinguishing between the artist and the work”, since it is fairly plain to me that often the moral rottenness of the artist is constitutive of the work. This extends even to philosophy, where any honest person will concede that Martin Heidegger was not “a great philosopher” who was “also a Nazi”, and that the whole challenge of dealing with Heidegger and his legacy is to figure out how Western philosophy developed in such a way that when Nazism emerged it made sense for at least one of its greatest expositors to offer his services as a handmaiden to this ideology. It is precisely for this reason that reading and understanding Heidegger is so urgent. There is nothing “honorific” about doing this; philosophy is not a fan club, and if you are treating it as one, this is because you do not really understand what philosophy is.
There are a couple of trends that Smith touches on that seem very strange to me. One is that the enforcers of the most stringent identitarian morality so often come from the world of YA fiction--if not as authors then at least as proponents. But once upon a time I was studying to become a schoolteacher. And included in this training was a class in Young Adult literature. At the time YA Lit was essentially a coverall term for children's books with accomplished prose. Occasionally they might contain mature scenes--sexual or otherwise--that you'd hesitate to show an 8-year-old, but not really a 15-year-old. And the object of exposing students to any of this was as part of a broader education, to help the youth become balanced and curious people. That's a worthy agenda, but apparently not a sexy one.
Smith also talks about an online meme of books that you might see on the shelf of a guy she goes home with, books that should warn her off. Seems to be a standard list of Hemingway, Foster Wallace, Nabokov. There's probably a lot that could be said for or against each author, but that's a conversation starter, not an ender. It's hard to see why a woman would need to be protected from a man's literary tastes, or pretensions to same. Unless he's not just a fan of the novel Lolita, but an actual ephebephile.
2 comments:
It seems to me that YA literature is a fairly modern invention. I read some books written especially for children when I was a child at a time when the idea of writing stories for children was still a novel one
JM Barrie wrote Peter Pan as an entertainment for a pair of children who lived in a neighboring house and not because he wanted to become a YA author. A similar friendship found Lewis Carroll as the author of Alice in Wonderland and the subsequent books. Both authors already had careers as writers of plays and poetry. Both authors became famous as writers of YA fiction, but neither wrote mostly for children (except, perhaps, Carroll when his earlier works gained popularity.
What I'm saying here, in very brief terms because it's still very hot in these parts and I can't stay on the computer for long, is that although authors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries may have written about children, Twain and Dickens come to mind first, but they weren't necessarily wring for any particular age group. If you could keep up with the language and the concepts it didn't matter what age the audience was.
It wasn't until after the Second World War that novels focused on young people came about. I think largely that was because there were a number of books at that point that featured sex and serious violence, topics not suitable for anyone other than adults.
I don't know anything about Heidigger and the only book I read by Nabokov was Lolita, a sad but fascinating account of an old man enthralled by a child. I never understood why it couldn't be read by anyone, but that's the kind of puritanical society that's developed since the war. Now anybody can read or watch anything they can get access to no matter their age. I agree with you that exposing students to somewhat coarse material may help them become more balanced and curious as they mature, but agendas don't always work in the way they may be promoted.
All in all, as Shakespeare most definitely knew, stories that last must be written for everyone to enjoy. Cervantes pulled that one off too.
This post was definitely more of a conversation starter than an ender. One day we'll have to take it further.
There are different measures of literacy. Therefore, the question of whether society is becoming less literate is not entirely straightforward. In terms of whether a broad number of people recognize the symbols that make up written language, no, literacy is not in any danger. But do as many people value the abstract thought that goes into language? That's not as clear.
Another thing about literature is that both author and reader are looking to understand the experiences of other people. That's one of its most fulfilling aspects and one of its most entertaining as well. But the idea of cross-cultural empathy is discouraged in some circles.
There's a lot to get my head around here, but the main point is that to thrive, literature needs to be able to unite people, and not just people with the same immutable traits.
Twain and Dickens didn't necessarily write for a particular age group. Their work does cast a wide enough net that some of their works do invite new and young readers.
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