Feeling embarrassed?*
Jun. 11th, 2014 08:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eldritchhobbitRuth Graham started it with her article at Slate: "Against YA: Read whatever you want. But you should feel embarrassed when what you’re reading was written for children." Graham manages to diss not only all of YA fiction, but also fantasy, science fiction, and detective fiction, as well, in favor of big-L Literature.
One of my favorite contemporary authors, Lyndsay Faye, has just responded with a wickedly tongue-in-cheek "thank you": "Slate Nailed It: YA and Detective Fiction Are for Rubes."
Faye's reply is well worth reading for insightful sarcasm like this:
"In a knockout left hook of an argument that left me reeling at Graham’s perspicacity, she later suggests, 'the YA and "new adult" boom may mean fewer teens aspire to grown-up reading, because the grown-ups they know are reading their books.' This is not merely true of adults reading Harry Potter, a terrible series touching on love, bravery, ultimate self-sacrifice, and a truly unambiguous, almost cartoonish character named Severus Snape; it is likewise true of detective fiction. When I was very young, I read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes at the behest of my dad, who loved The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. My father’s unabashed admiration for the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have stunted my capacity to comprehend literary fiction, razing my intellect like a nuclear winter, had a half-bespectacled, elbow-patched stranger not bashed me over the head with a first edition Finnegan’s Wake when I was a nubile sixteen years of age. If not for this vigilante illuminati (they have capes, and a lair), I would not now have To the Lighthouse and Beloved open at either elbow so I can read them simultaneously in my periphery while writing this article in praise of 'Against YA.'"
* Nope, me neither.
One of my favorite contemporary authors, Lyndsay Faye, has just responded with a wickedly tongue-in-cheek "thank you": "Slate Nailed It: YA and Detective Fiction Are for Rubes."
Faye's reply is well worth reading for insightful sarcasm like this:
"In a knockout left hook of an argument that left me reeling at Graham’s perspicacity, she later suggests, 'the YA and "new adult" boom may mean fewer teens aspire to grown-up reading, because the grown-ups they know are reading their books.' This is not merely true of adults reading Harry Potter, a terrible series touching on love, bravery, ultimate self-sacrifice, and a truly unambiguous, almost cartoonish character named Severus Snape; it is likewise true of detective fiction. When I was very young, I read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes at the behest of my dad, who loved The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. My father’s unabashed admiration for the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have stunted my capacity to comprehend literary fiction, razing my intellect like a nuclear winter, had a half-bespectacled, elbow-patched stranger not bashed me over the head with a first edition Finnegan’s Wake when I was a nubile sixteen years of age. If not for this vigilante illuminati (they have capes, and a lair), I would not now have To the Lighthouse and Beloved open at either elbow so I can read them simultaneously in my periphery while writing this article in praise of 'Against YA.'"
* Nope, me neither.
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no subject
Date: 2014-06-11 01:12 pm (UTC)Is that writer - the original one - serious? Oyyyyyy.
Some people just want to read stuff that strokes their ego. Look how smart I am - I read big boring hard grown-up books! Some of us, however, are secure enough in our adulthood that we don't let other people dictate what we should read...which, BTW, seems to me quite juvenile, the idea of worrying what others think or whether we're quite "grown-up" enough....
Thanks for sharing!
no subject
Date: 2014-06-11 03:26 pm (UTC)I love your comments. They remind me of what C.S. Lewis said in "On Three Ways of Writing for Children":
"Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
no subject
Date: 2014-06-11 01:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-11 03:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-11 03:05 pm (UTC)The important thing is whether a book is well written. There's crappy YA but there is also crappy "literature".
no subject
Date: 2014-06-11 03:34 pm (UTC)YES! Exactly. *nods head emphatically*
Link fix?
Date: 2014-06-11 06:34 pm (UTC)Re: Link fix?
Date: 2014-06-11 06:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-11 07:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-19 12:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-11 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-19 12:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-06-12 01:08 pm (UTC)As a conspiratologist, my favorite theory is Calvin Hoffman's -- that Francis and Anthony Bacon faked Christopher Marlowe's death in 1593 and Marlowe wrote Shakespeare's plays from a hideout in Verona, Italy. (Where he also apparently learned to write female characters. But that's beside the point.) But by and large the Authorship Controversy is less plausible than, say, the Loch Ness Monster -- there are historical cases of new mega fauna being discovered, but there aren't any I know of where a rich and famous person pays a nonentity to sign masterpieces he wrote, instead of the other way around. And the notion that Ben Jonson, to pick just one of Shakespeare's contemporaries who would have to be part of any cover-up, would willingly conspire to keep his great rival's secret is beyond ridicule.
A lot of it seems like a weird flinch from the notion that middle-class nobodies can make art -- when of course that's who made the vast majority of art throughout history, and especially English history, and even more especially English literature. By comparison, in all English history, there are only two hereditary peers who have written great literature. (Two and a half if you count Dunsany.) The Marlowe theory at least picks another middle-class tradesman's son, although he went to Cambridge like a gentleman.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-21 12:34 pm (UTC)Yes, YES! This!!!
there are historical cases of new mega fauna being discovered, but there aren't any I know of where a rich and famous person pays a nonentity to sign masterpieces he wrote, instead of the other way around.
Ha! Hite makes a great point here.
A lot of it seems like a weird flinch from the notion that middle-class nobodies can make art -- when of course that's who made the vast majority of art throughout history, and especially English history, and even more especially English literature.
Another terrific insight.
I love your comments, and I think you're spot on. Thanks for this!
no subject
Date: 2014-06-12 10:50 pm (UTC)Even if not for those examples, there is a significant sprinkling of YA among what I read. If anyone cared, I'd claim to be just a big kid! Also, I am told that now I have passed 60, since I have avoided growing up so far, it is no longer compulsory.
no subject
Date: 2014-06-21 12:36 pm (UTC)Ha! That's very encouraging news.
I'm with you 100%.
This reminds me of C.S. Lewis, who wrote, "When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
no subject
Date: 2014-06-24 02:32 am (UTC)I will now return to the middle grade novel I was reading. For some reason I have a big soft spot for middle grade fiction...
no subject
Date: 2014-07-08 10:42 pm (UTC)Oh no! Sorry for the initial disturbing moments there. :( Woe!!! You're right: that original piece is obnoxious nonsense!
Happy middle-grade reading! That's awesome.
YA
Date: 2014-06-25 07:04 pm (UTC)Scorners like Ms. Graham seem to forget the high levels of authorial skill and insight required to produce effective YA, and the degree to which the resulting prose can influence the young readers' tastes for good writing in adulthood.
Also, there is no greater enemy of art than the posturing of those who aspire to it and fall short.
On second thought, there is one greater enemy (but not, I think, relevant to the present discussion): the subversion of free expression to promote dictatorial agendas
feeling embarrassed?
Date: 2014-07-20 04:45 pm (UTC)http://alasnotme.blogspot.com/2014/07/are-those-adults-reading-ya-horror.html