they did not replaced Hemingway and Kipling BY A WOMAN. Sorry, I should have been clearer, but this sentence was completing the previous sentence.
At the end, it's basically what I'm saying: they replace Conrad by Austen, and one says "it's woke because they replace men by women", but they replace Kipling by Steinbeck, and one says "it's woke because they replace a man with a right ideology with a man with a left ideology". They would have replaced Austen by Conrad and one would have said "it's woke because Conrad was anti-imperialist". They would have replaced Steinbeck by Kipling and one would have said "it's woke because Kipling is more multicultural than america-centered Steinbeck".
> This change I feel is one of the least objectionable, IMHO. The point of the paragraph seems to be that Mathilda read kind of stuffy old books, and fed her imagination with them. If the namedropped authors aren't well known by today's children, why not adjust them?
Do you remember analyzing books in school? One of the things we were taught to keep in mind as a lens of analysis was the author as a person, and why they might have written what they wrote. I think this is a great example: Why did Dahl choose the authors he chose to mention? In Matilda, in many cases, I believe he did it to tacitly recommend those books and authors to his readers. To the age group that makes up Dahl's readership, most of them probably weren't well known even at the peak of their popularity. That's sort of the point: Dahl's saying--possibly--"go check this out, my young readers".
So yeah, I think it's pretty crass to just change it to a different author. Dahl is an author calling out fellow authors in his book. It happens in movies a lot, too, where filmmakers will put subtle (or not-so-subtle) nods to their peers and forebears and inspirations in their work. I think, as a rule, if the audience notices it, it was probably intentional. Most authors and filmmakers care about other authors and filmmakers a lot more than we do. None of them would be okay with somebody in the future mucking with their references because people aren't immediately getting the reference. They'd be like... "No! The whole point was to immortalize that person or work further by mentioning it in my work!"
> BTW the transformation is visible in literature, which is how I noticed it. The sense of geography in, say, Jane Austin is completely alien to today
Now I'm curious, don't remember such a difference, but then it's been a long time since I read Jane Austen. Don't suppose you could put your finger on exactly how she handles geography that a writer like Stephen King or China Mieville doesn't?
Nice placement of a semicolon: "That's not of any importance, even my life and work are not of any importance to me right now, nothing is of any importance; except I must find him."
"The window frame trembled with the speed of the motion, the pane hung over empty darkness, and dots of light slashed across the glass as luminous streaks, once in a while." What?
"What she felt in that moment contained, as one nameless part of it, the knowledge of the beauty in the posture of his body as he held her, as they stood in the middle of the room high above the lights of the city"
Again, what?
"This is the world and the core of it, this is what made the city – they go together, the angular shapes of the city and the angular shapes lines of a face stripped of everything but purpose – the rising steps of steel and the steps of being intent upon a goal – this is what they had been, all the men who lived to invent the lights, the steel, the furnaces, the motors – they were the world, they, not the men who crouched in dark corners, half-begging, half-threatening, boastfully displaying their open sores as their only claim on life and virtue – so long as he knew that there existed one man with the bright courage of a new thought, could be given up the world to those other? – so long as he could find a single sight to give him a life-restoring shot of admiration, could he believe that the world belonged to the sores, the moans and the guns? – the men who invented motors did exist, he would never doubt their reality, it was his vision of them that had made the contrast unbearable, so that even the loathing was the tribute of his loyalty to them and to that world which was theirs and his."
Open sores? Why not just choose a suitably racist epithet.
A 50 page speech? Would anyone listening to that (other than in the fake world that the book is set in) actually be awake?
These I got from just googling around, I don't have the book handy. I'll leave you with a quote from an actual writer, Salman Rushdie:
"No. I am not--and have never been--influenced by Ayn Rand. In fact, I pity anyone who is influenced by Ayn Rand. It's almost as bad as being influenced by Dan Brown."
And finally you can go read George Orwell on why the kind of prose that Rand writes, isn't just bad, it's evil. The same way Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto are evil:
"As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse."
> I just didn't find the characters in the books for my age group, who were largely written by women, to be relatable
Were you reading contemporary books or older books? I found that there's lots of fiction for boys, written by men, from the 19th and 20th centuries. A lot of it is very good, many popular classics like Treasure Island. Edit: I see you mentioned that one.
Why put up with a brilliant premise ruined by a lesser writer. Worse, what if Updike had been wrong? What if not only the premise but also its rendition were perfect?
> I had to consider the idea: how would those books have affected me if all characters looked nothing like me?
FWIW: Several of my role models - if you include people who are not alive, people I've only read about - are not white males.
I guess in my case it was more important to relate to their background and their skills (or lack of ;-) than who their parents were, and where they grew up.
For a context: Russian, read several Bulgakov's works as a teenager, as it was part of a school program.
To provide an alternative view: I did not like "Master and Margarita", especially compared to "Heart of the Dog" and what I consider Bulgakov's best novel "The White Guard". Part of this has to do that with the fact that author chose religion and mysticism as literary vehicles and I am not a big fan of either. The whole book felt rather frivolous. I warmed up to this type of novel after reading several works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez though much later.
"The White Guard" on the other hand left much deeper impression on me. The novel does a great job showing helplessness of people in front of their old life crumbling down, caught in a whirlwind of turbulent times.
> It was published in 1954, at a time when literary modernism was dominant and pervading the academy. Modernist writers were obsessed with interiority, broke with prior literary convention, and traded in irony, ambiguity and convoluted psychology.
I don't understand what is being said here. I assume I'm supposed to already be familiar with those literary criticism concepts.
I got a completely different feeling. I read this as 'we have both been irrevocably shaped by our influences into being entirely different types of writer, thinking the other's have little merit - but we may both have merit'.
> Really does feel orwellian to change the authors being referenced.
> This change I feel is one of the least objectionable, IMHO.
I think it's one of the most objectionable changes. Removing authors whose politics have gone out of style, and replacing them with more palatable ones, reminds me of Party members airbrushed out of photos with Stalin.
That it's done in a children's book is that much worse - a middle-man censor posing as Dahl and recommending what books to read, and presenting a false consensus on which authors were popular.
>Characters exist in the world they inhabit, not yours or mine or anyone else’s.
Is this always the intent of the author? Sometimes authors want their characters to live in a world that is identical to ours.
>A huge part of the artistic experience is reinterpreting and reframing the meaning of a work as society develops.
Is this always the intent of the author? Reinterpreting work based on things that occurred since its creation seems to produce and inherent disconnect with what the author intended in the moment.
>Emotional and moral complexity is a goal in literature, not a bug.
Is this always the intent of the author? Not every story needs to be about every complex topic. We don't need to deal with slavery and child abuse for example in a story about a chocolate factory. The book already has its own complex topics that it directly intended to address.
>Again I must gently disagree. First off, it’s not “accidental bigotry”. It’s bigotry reflective of the time in which it was written.
Is this always the intent of the author? Not every author wants their work to be reflective of a specific moment in time. Some stories are meant to be timeless.
>But please don’t attribute their edits to “preserving authorial intent”. That’s putting (even more) words in the mouths of the dead.
You are also putting words in the mouth of the dead by assuming the answer to those above questions. I don't know why one side of this debate gets to claim they speak for the dead with perfect accuracy.
> Of course there was even the episode of his name featuring in the 100 'Women' novelists of 20th century list of Time magazine.
For those curious, it was in a small 2016 article about college textbooks [1] ("These Are the 100 Most-Read Female Writers in College Classes"). Not some prominent 100 women novelists of the 20th century list that was their cover story. At the bottom of the page it has a correction notice. People like to say Time Magazine made the mistake, because it blows it out of proportion and sounds better. If you say that one writer - David Johnson - made a mistake, it entirely loses its punch.
> Also as a male feminist ally who doesn't really read women/queer/poc authors (I don't read too many books period) I really need to start doing so more.
It dawned on me that after picking up books again (mostly SciFi), I had not read anything by a female author, nor had I read anything with a strong female or POC main character.
This kinda thing is probably not surprising to most who read classic SciFi. But if anyone has any recommendations for decent classic/modern SciFi novels by female, or with female protagonist I'd be interested.
I also just got back into reading, so forgive me if I've glossed over some incredible classic that meets that criteria.
Also, people might ask why it matters. How could it not? I've been readin stories about, a broken man, a bullish man, a smart man, a confused man. All men! I need some strong female characters to switch it up. William Gibson's Necromancer had something going with Molly, but it left more to be desired for me.
> The opposite to Flowers for Algernon is Captain America.
They're not opposites, they're orthogonal. Flowers for Algernon is a science fiction story. Science fiction stories are usually (always?) about how the human experience is affected by some hypothetical new technology. The new technology often has a fatal flaw or unexpected consequences. The stories are often tragic.
Captain America, on the other hand, is not science fiction. Captain America is a comic superhero and his stories are usually (always?) heroic adventures. Heroic adventures follow a predictable pattern beginning with a call to adventure and ending with the hero returning home having slain the dragon.
At the end, it's basically what I'm saying: they replace Conrad by Austen, and one says "it's woke because they replace men by women", but they replace Kipling by Steinbeck, and one says "it's woke because they replace a man with a right ideology with a man with a left ideology". They would have replaced Austen by Conrad and one would have said "it's woke because Conrad was anti-imperialist". They would have replaced Steinbeck by Kipling and one would have said "it's woke because Kipling is more multicultural than america-centered Steinbeck".
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