> books that give voice to the experiences of people who look and live like the young readers in my classroom
This is the change that has left a reader like me stranded on an alien shore. I never in my life looked for this kind of identity or connection in what I read. It never occurred to me that any book would be about someone like me and I never sought it out. Ironically this change means it is hard for me to relate to modern readers which is something I do sometimes hope to do.
Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities" speaks of how one of the things that enabled the formation of modern nations was the expansion of literacy coupled to the writing of precisely such stories.
While stories of kings and heroes had been everpresent, the "pesasant's tale" was relatively rare and almost never given the treatment of written work. But the lowering of the cost, the increase in literacy globally, and the proliferation of control over the art of writing from an elite caste to the public at large led to the writing of "man on the street" and "day in the life of" stories that were one of the ingredients that catalyzed people's ability to think of themselves not as vassals of a king or supplicants to a god, but fellow humans in a nation.
When you could identify with the tribulations of a man in Mumbai from your flat in London because he happened to write his tale in the language you could read, a global British Empire began to knit together in a way that it wasn't consolidated under the simple idea "This is all the King's lands." Empathy glued your life to his life, even though you were on opposite ends of the globe and would never meet each other.
As a young reader many years ago, I gravitated towards stories that were the most alien -- not just science fiction, but history, cultures, and experiences that were completely different from my own, populated with characters that thought and interacted with the world in ways I would never have considered. I typically found books about suburban kids "just like me" boring. And I rarely stuck with a series for more than a handful of books because even the most inventive premise and characters often become repetitive after more than a few books.
But many equally voracious friends prefered reading stories set in the countries and cultures with which they already felt comfortable, populated with protagonists who were stand-ins for themselves encountering situations that they themselves had dealt with.
The lovely thing about the world is that we have an effectively infinite supply of good literature of both types and indeed anywhere on that spectrum, so both types of readers will continue to be well supported.
Yes. Classics are so because they are atemporal. The protagonist’s “environment” is irrelevant, it is their personality and the narrative, the plot. The “felt life”…
Noone reads Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde because they feel their environment and kind of lif is “similar” to one’s.
This is funny to me because I recently re-read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and I found the general vibe very appealing. I'm not currently immersed in a world of well-spoken high-status gentlemen-scientists who carry out their own experiments and enforce the law themselves without any bureaucracy -- but it sure does seem appealing to me!
I won't make any presumptions about your background. I can tell you that for me, there was a definite point where I realized that all my favorite characters were male, and I though it sucked. Were women really incapable of having great adventures? Was there something wrong with me or something wrong with everyone else?
Agreed. When I was growing up, I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. I was equally interested in books about boys, girls, black people, white people, you name it. I read Goosebumps with equal interest as The Babysitters' Club. Having such a wide variety of topics that I read (and consumed in other media) made me a better, more well rounded person.
The idea that people must see things that look like them is toxic. We need to raise children who learn to look past superficial characteristics to see the deep human similarities beneath them, not children who uphold race (etc) as the most important thing you can know about a person.
Unfortunately, there are too many people now who believe they are liberal and tolerant but don't know what it means since they preach and practice exactly the opposite values. It's sad because they spit on gains of the sexual, gender, and cultural revolutions up until about the 1970's and instead behave like hypocritical, ignorant fascists similar to the ones who were worth resisting centuries previously. I think the core problems are a lack of mentors and lack of pushback from previous generations of academic and cultural thought leaders to say "that's absurd". Instead, academically weak and immature instructors in academia are inculcating subsequent generations with misguided and absurd ideas about as equally insane as the MAGA movement. The result expressed on the greater society is we now have these 2 extremist cults who are doppelgängers of each other who suck the oxygen out of public policy and discourse.
This whole thread I feel like I'm another world, everyone is using all these euphemisms that I can't figure out the referent to. What is "prevailing orthodoxy" what is "contemporary social dialogues" what are y'all talking about. I'm serious I just cannot tell.
The translation is: kids are self-obsessed and self-absorbed, inclusive of identity progressivism like pronouns and under-represented representation.
The selfie generation(s). 2006 Time's Person of the Year: You.
For my taste, that seems to well be true, but all generations have their thing and those that don't agree with the positions will of course conclude these "new things" are very very bad things.
On the selfie obsession: social media is poison but that's hardly unique to the kids. The adults are doing all the damage.
Well yes in the sense that "kids these days" is a moving goal post.
My sense is that millennials are split: the older half fatigued and eyerolly regarding "too much wokeness" and the younger still thinking themselves young and leaning into whatever the socials are on about.
This isn't a moral judgement. Just one millennial's observation.
The kids being talked about in this submission must surely be Gen Z if they are college students. The youngest Millenial would be older graduate students, segregated from the freshmen and whatnot.
But of course the whole generations business is arbitrary. People would be just as insistent about the realness of this and that generation if they switched the years up or down five years.
There's a widespread social movement in the US which posits that your race and gender identity are very important and you ought to frame everything you do in terms of them, and this movement seems to be influencing the author.
The reason people are using euphemisms is that naming the movement is intensely controversial. The most common term used by its opponents is "woke", but proponents near-universally consider this to be rude; there's no consensus alternative, because many proponents think it's just true and thus giving it a name at all is argumentative. (What do you call the movement of people who think the sky is blue?)
Oh I see, thanks. So this is just the standard grievance farming culture war moral panic on HN? That's what it felt like but I didn't want to jump to conclusions.
It's odd. I'm an anarchist. I'm socially progressive, yes, but more often than not I find myself outnumbered in conversations by people disagreeing with me or even diametrically opposed to me. This is even more so the case online and especially not exclusively here on HN where the cultural bias in any sense that it exists at all is in favor of a vague sense of Peter Thiel style right-libertarianism with streaks of ineffective liberalism - you're more likely to find someone referring to themselves as "Georgist" than "socialist". I consistently get downvoted in political threads on HN.
However I don't have any reason to use euphemisms and I don't need to use vaguery and colorful language and appeals to fringe scientists to express my opinion. In my experience this is because my ideology is very hard to object to on moral grounds: I want you (yes, you too) to have more control over your life and for us (yes, that also means you and me) to be allowed and able to support each other better. I want you (yes, you too) to be able to be able to express yourself and have your consent or lack thereof respected. I don't want us to be suppressed by a state, a religion or an arbitrary often hereditary elite who have amassed disproportionate claims to wealth they can enforce using the physical violence of others. This even applies when I criticize Israel or Zionism - because when I do that, I say what I mean and I don't use my words as proxies for some kind of anti-semitism.
I get laughed at sometimes, I get called names sometimes, I upset people sometimes. But never do I feel the need to obfuscate my ideals except if I were literally surrounded by a violent mob seeking to exterminate the people I'm arguing for the protection of.
But any time someone hides behind euphemisms and vaguery, if you chip away at it, it's never just conservatism or some modest but insufferable reactionary views - it almost always ends up being some blend of race realism or scientific racism, belief in conspiracy theories (which always turn out to be about Jews in the end, knowingly or not), deep hatred and disgust towards trans or queer people, hatred towards women, hatred towards foreign cultures in general, hatred and disgust towards people with disabilities or marginalized people "speaking out of turn" and deeply rooted, integral, vitriolic obsession with social hierarchies and their enforcement against the "undeservering" and "degenerates".
I just don't think that's true. As you say, you get called names sometimes - I think most people who hide behind euphemisms and vaguery just find it tedious or exhausting to get called names when discussing their views. There's multiple topics like education where I can be 100% confident that people are going to accuse me of something like "grievance farming culture war moral panic" if I share my views. I don't personally see the appeal of vagueposting, so I try to either engage and accept the insults or move on, but I understand why other people make different calls.
And if we look at the current social trend of everyone feeling more and more alienated from each other, perhaps we should push back on the social dialogue.
The idea that you need a story written by(or about) someone of your race&gender&orientation in order to connect to it is just wrong.
Do I need to be an 81 year old farmer or a playwright in order to understand Giles Cory's plight?
Do I need to be a woman, a puritan or a novelist in order to understand the trials of Hester Prynne?
Nor do I need to be a Frenchman to understand that people can change and that we should not hound them to the ends of the earth because they once committed crimes?
These stories and more are read to lay a foundation of understanding about the society that we live in and why/how we have the laws and morals that we do.
They also show how close we are to our past and how things would be if we regressed as well as letting us look at how we may want to extend these lessons into the laws and culture we create in the future.
It's just a line. There is very little truth to it but the line works, and it helps people with doing things like changing the curriculum away from longstanding classics to books that will be forgotten in a decade.
> It never occurred to me that any book would be about someone like me
I don't know quite how you feel about it but you could easily consider this a personal tragedy and rejoice that a new generation doesn't have to experience it. Never reading a book about people like you doesn't make you strong or wise, and no one is weak for wanting to see themselves in one either.
If my life was interesting enough to write a book about, it would entail a lot more conflict and suffering than I would actually want in my life. That’s sort of a limiting factor. If someone wrote a book about my life, most of it would be extremely boring and the rest would cover parts of my life that I would rather not spend too much time dwelling on.
> Never reading a book about people like you doesn't make you strong or wise, and no one is weak for wanting to see themselves in one either.
On the contrary. If one cannot appreciate a work of art unless it reflects them on the surface, that is a character flaw. We must discourage such things, not give into it as the current establishment does.
Post-modernity caused a fracture of identity into ever smaller fragments and communities. (Century of the Self, even though that was about the previous century)
EDIT: The Culture of Narcissism is also relevant. Although I still don’t understand what narcissism is. And don’t read it if you are running a presidential campaign.
This is the change that has left a reader like me stranded on an alien shore. I never in my life looked for this kind of identity or connection in what I read. It never occurred to me that any book would be about someone like me and I never sought it out. Ironically this change means it is hard for me to relate to modern readers which is something I do sometimes hope to do.