My Two Cents...
This thread regarding Young Adult Fiction is just too good not to weight in on.
I can't help but feel like Ann Hulbert is totally "picking a fight that doesn't, by any stretch of the imagination, need to be picked", mainly due to the fact that this sounds more like an issue of a particular teacher assigning books that are clearly aimed at a much younger audience, which I find more disturbing than the controversial content of The Buffalo Tree. I think it's downright criminal to talk down to 11th graders (or any child for that matter), let alone insult their intelligence by making them read the kind of books they should have been reading at say, age 8 or so, depending on reading ability. To wit, Ann Hulbert even alludes to that notion before careening off into an intellectual ditch...
"A book like The Buffalo Tree can't really bear more than reductive analysis, which reveals it to be a studiously packaged pedagogical lesson, a contrived vehicle for an ultimately upbeat psychosocial message that is at odds with the supposedly realistic setting ("At the end of the novel, Sura … has returned home with his spirit and his sanity intact"). But this is just the sort of saccharine simplicity that high-school kids, newly alert to life's ambiguities, are beginning to pride themselves on seeing through. It's hard to imagine an exercise more effectively designed to leave kids with the impression that fiction—in class and out, classic or not—is unlikely to be either very entertaining or enlightening."
What?!
Excuse me Ann, but do you read this stuff back to yourself before it goes out over the net?
I think tearing apart The Buffalo Tree is a pretty pathetic exercise in intellectual masturbation, given the fact that the book is clearly intended for an audience much younger than 17. So yes, the book is strikingly simplistic, and of course 17 year olds will see through that, not to mention the teacher that had the bright idea to assign it in the first place. Way to go Ann. You really dug deep there. Also, just because you didn't find The Buffalo Tree entertaining or enlightening doesn't mean that it isn't for someone that is so far beneath you intellectually. Could you be any more condescending?
As far as exercises that "leave kids with the impression that fiction—in class and out, classic or not— is unlikely to be either very entertaining or enlightening", I can think of one that's far worse than choosing a book that's "too young" for its reader- namely, the perpetuation of the idea that "fluff books" are destroying our Literary tradition, which is what I think Hulbert is alluding to. There just doesn't seem to be any room in Literature for books that get us started as readers. They are constantly derided as not being "adult" enough, but isn't that their exact point? No one dreamed of handing me Ulysses when I was 8, and why would they? How is an 8 year old supposed to even fathom the complexity of that book?
And finally, before I completely lose it - I never worry about the "fluff" that young kids read because I have faith in a young reader's ability to grow beyond the "fluff", and even if they don't - so what? Who made the rule that we all have to be Literary snobs?
I can't help but feel like Ann Hulbert is totally "picking a fight that doesn't, by any stretch of the imagination, need to be picked", mainly due to the fact that this sounds more like an issue of a particular teacher assigning books that are clearly aimed at a much younger audience, which I find more disturbing than the controversial content of The Buffalo Tree. I think it's downright criminal to talk down to 11th graders (or any child for that matter), let alone insult their intelligence by making them read the kind of books they should have been reading at say, age 8 or so, depending on reading ability. To wit, Ann Hulbert even alludes to that notion before careening off into an intellectual ditch...
"A book like The Buffalo Tree can't really bear more than reductive analysis, which reveals it to be a studiously packaged pedagogical lesson, a contrived vehicle for an ultimately upbeat psychosocial message that is at odds with the supposedly realistic setting ("At the end of the novel, Sura … has returned home with his spirit and his sanity intact"). But this is just the sort of saccharine simplicity that high-school kids, newly alert to life's ambiguities, are beginning to pride themselves on seeing through. It's hard to imagine an exercise more effectively designed to leave kids with the impression that fiction—in class and out, classic or not—is unlikely to be either very entertaining or enlightening."
What?!
Excuse me Ann, but do you read this stuff back to yourself before it goes out over the net?
I think tearing apart The Buffalo Tree is a pretty pathetic exercise in intellectual masturbation, given the fact that the book is clearly intended for an audience much younger than 17. So yes, the book is strikingly simplistic, and of course 17 year olds will see through that, not to mention the teacher that had the bright idea to assign it in the first place. Way to go Ann. You really dug deep there. Also, just because you didn't find The Buffalo Tree entertaining or enlightening doesn't mean that it isn't for someone that is so far beneath you intellectually. Could you be any more condescending?
As far as exercises that "leave kids with the impression that fiction—in class and out, classic or not— is unlikely to be either very entertaining or enlightening", I can think of one that's far worse than choosing a book that's "too young" for its reader- namely, the perpetuation of the idea that "fluff books" are destroying our Literary tradition, which is what I think Hulbert is alluding to. There just doesn't seem to be any room in Literature for books that get us started as readers. They are constantly derided as not being "adult" enough, but isn't that their exact point? No one dreamed of handing me Ulysses when I was 8, and why would they? How is an 8 year old supposed to even fathom the complexity of that book?
And finally, before I completely lose it - I never worry about the "fluff" that young kids read because I have faith in a young reader's ability to grow beyond the "fluff", and even if they don't - so what? Who made the rule that we all have to be Literary snobs?
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