[ SECRET POST #2238 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2238 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 097 secrets from Secret Submission Post #320.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[dreemyweird]

...Pornographic literature then?

They're not what one would call YA today. I mean, almost all the genres have at least some history, and there are historically/culturally significant books for almost all of the genres I can think of, but it doesn't mean that they fall into the same category as their modern analogues. In this sense it IS a matter of age.

It is all the more important with YA, for it heavily depends on all the things cultural.

I must admit, though, that my position was shaken. I thought I could easily find something that excludes classical works, but it's not like I see anything apart from pornography.

[jain]

...Pornographic literature then?

Satyricon, One Thousand and One Nights, Decameron, The Life of an Amorous Woman, Fanny Hill, Les Liaisons dangereuses, Tropic of Cancer, The Story of O, etc.

[dreemyweird]

T_T

Still, Decameron is not what we call pornography nowadays. Real genres are different from the theoretical ones, since they fluctuate easily.

Also (quote from the thread above):
"...I now think that the only category that actually excludes classics is the category of silly and cheesy literature that was purposefully created to be sold and forgotten. It does exist, though. And don't tell me that Conan Doyle wrote things for this reason: he sure did, but there are worse cases. Some people make teams of hack writers to do incredibly shitty novels under one nom de plume. These most certainly can't be good enough to enter history.'

[(Anonymous)]

what would you call YA today? would you define YA as necessarily including contemporary pop culture? that is not a definition of YA I've heard before.

is a book set in a fantasy world with a teenage girl dealing with universal teenage issues but fighting dragons instead of going to high school, then, not YA? if it is YA, would it no longer be YA 100 years later? :/

i've read classics. i hate most of the ones i've read. but at least i can say i know i hate those books because i read them, instead of because i dislike all classics. saying "i don't like all classics even though i've never read any" is just as dumb as saying "i don't like all fanfic even though i've never read any"

[dreemyweird]

Eh, no. When I was talking about "culture", I essentially meant "cultural background". It's not so much about themes as about the way the book is dramatic and entertaining; it should be dramatic and entertaining for the modern teenagers, and this requires some specific features to be present. Like, you can't write about something without "translating" the context. You can't write about the times of Louis XIV, use jokes from this time, mention all those tiny details of the daily life and not explain it with the underlying assumption that your audience is unaware of the connotations. Naturally Twain does not "translate" things; he has no notion of the context into which they're to be translated some hundered years later.

/this is my theory about YA/

That being said, fanfic does not qualify. One may dislike all the fanfiction because of its very idea; that is, all the fanfiction DOES have one thing in common - it is all unoriginal.

I do think it laudable to read things in order to hate them. No sarcasm intended.

[corellianrogue]

...Actually...

Can we count ancient Greek and Roman literature in with the Classics? (As the picture includes Aesop's Fables, I'm going to anyway.) Because... ahaha, please tell me someone else here has read The Golden Ass. Please. (Among others, but that's certainly the most complete manuscript.)

Or even better, The Satyricon. I shall let Wiki describe it for me, though, because it's been ages since I read it. "The surviving portions of the text detail the misadventures of the narrator, Encolpius, and his lover, a handsome sixteen-year-old boy named Giton. Throughout the novel, Encolpius has a hard time keeping his lover faithful to him as he is constantly being enticed away by others."

Not trying to say you're wrong about them not being the same as the modern books, btw. Just... the things you find in Classical Roman and Greek literature. Craziness.

[dreemyweird]

:D True enough.

I don't feel that blatant pornography is ever considered classical, though.

Pushkin, for instance, has a lot of poems that include obscenities; and although Pushkin is undoubtedly classical, it doesn't occur to anybody to include these things in the school curriculum or whatnot. There's, in fact, a fair amount of people who condemn The Gabrieliad.

[chardmonster]

Oh for fuck's sake

Are you defining classic literature by what's on school curriculums now?

[dreemyweird]

Well, no? It was just an example. It only reflects the general attitude towards these poems.

But I also think that modern school reading tries to include the creme de la creme of the "classical" literature, so it's not entirely unreasonable.

[chardmonster]

Not really. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who wouldn't put De Sade or Lady Chatterly's Lover on the list of classics. However you won't be taught those in high school because

1. Most kids won't really get it and just giggle
2. Parents will scream at you

Works with heavy sexual content just don't get taught until college/university.

There's also the fact that people putting together school curriculums have to worry about teaching literacy as well as teaching cultural touchstones. A lot of what kids at least in my school district read wouldn't be considered "classics" but instead were used to teach certain basic concepts and filled out some multicultural aspects (The House on Mango Street, for example).

[lunabee34]

*nods*

We didn't get to read any of the awesome stuff from Chaucer or Boccaccio until college; the parents in the rural Bible belt I grew up in would have thrown fits. LOL

[(Anonymous)]

We read Chaucer in my freshman year English class in high school.

My English teachers were awesome (except for junior year, but the others were fucking great)

[lunabee34]

We read Chaucer in high school too but it was very carefully culled Chaucer. No sexy stories for us! LOL

[(Anonymous)]

We got the culled version of Chaucer too -- mostly just pieces of the Canterbury Tales because we simply didn't have the time to translate 400 pages of Middle English into normal teenager speak. And I was granted permission to do my project on DH Lawrence, thus read Lady Chatterly's Lover. De Sade was talked about but never explicitly studied.

But then, I had a teacher who thought everything was a metaphor for vaginas/sex in senior year lit class -- except the river in Heart of Darkness. And it was through one of the books he assigned that the class learnt what "snowballing" was... It was a room full of giggling 17/18 year olds and he just looked at us and said, quite dismissive and seriously, "Oh, stop. You'll understand when you're older." That was pretty much the approach. He'd present literature as it is, no dumbing down for age. (In retrospect it sounds sort of pervy? But it really wasn't. I know what perv teachers are like and he was not one of them. He merely wanted to treat us like adults.)

He certainly didn't shy away from sexual content. (We also watched Pulp Fiction in class.) Granted it was gifted English and we expected to be more mature and intelligent than the rest of the school population, but still.

I will say I don't know any one else who's had quite the same "liberal" approach to sexual content in their senior English classes. It's certainly not the norm and there's likely a good reason for that.

We also read a lot of the "classics" throughout the years. I can't say I liked all of them, but the one thing I did learn is that holy shit they are diverse and apart from them being considered "classics" and well-written (supposedly) there is nothing else in common across the genres.

I'm not sure what my point was here. I guess some teachers say, "Fuck the system," and teach sexual content anyway. Especially when they know that this is likely the only time most of these kids will be exposed to the classics, etc. Most will not be doing English in uni. And he just wanted to show us classics beyond the typical To Kill A Mockingbird, The Outsiders, and Catcher in the Rye, etc (all of which we had read in younger years).

[(Anonymous)]

Considering that schools are one of the most common means for people to be introduced to (and put off of) books they'd call 'classical literature', that's not as ridiculous a criteron as you're making it out to be.

[(Anonymous)]

Not only that, even a lot of medieval literature has the same sort of a thing.

I mean, look at the Miller's Tale from Chaucer, or the Decameron, or even a lot of the old tales of knights and paladins. There's an extraordinary range to the depiction of life and reality in the classics, and the idea that you have this stuffy, restrained scope of things, and the novelistic attitude that is taken towards material, is in a lot of ways a relatively recent, modern development - more Victorian than anything else.

[kathkin]

The Satyricon is my very favourite thing! :D Giton is the best character. <3

I never finished the Golden Ass, though.

[(Anonymous)]

Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Catcher in the Rye, and The Outsiders are absolutely, 100% YA. I read and enjoyed all of them when I was a teenager, because I could relate to them.

YA is basically "teenager does stupid shit or has stupid shit happen to her during The Melancholy Time of Adolescence and Consequences Happen because of this stupid shit." That fits with ALL the classics that I also consider YA. Just because Huck Finn doesn't have any vampire friends or didn't fight in the Hunger Games doesn't mean he's any less YA than Twilight or Hunger Games.

[(Anonymous)]

The fact that teenagers can read and appreciate a thing doesn't make it YA. Neither does the fact that a thing is about teenagers.

Catcher in the Rye, in particular, is not YA by any sense of the imagination; it's literature as much as anything is (whether or not you think it's good is another question; it's not my favorite book personally). I mean, when it was written, it had an immense readership, and a mostly adult readership; it was reviewed as an adult book (and reviewed extremely well), marketed as an adult book, and bought as an adult book. It's a work of literature that's accessible to teenagers. It's assigned in classes because it's easy to teach, because it's accessible, but also because it's got a really high stature as a work of literature. I think the same is mostly true of Mark Twain, who's a titan of American. Not as familiar with the other works so I can't say. But yeah - the fact that something can be enjoyed by teenagers doesn't make it YA, and when you have a book that was published as an adult book and immensely popular with adults, it's really hard for me to see why it should be called YA.

(Also, there's a phenomenon that seems to be very common these days whereby it seems to be very difficult for teenagers to relate to Catcher in the Rye, nowadays. A lot of people who read it now seem to think of Holden as whiny and entitled and annoying. Very odd phenomenon)

[(Anonymous)]

The technical definition of YA, which is basically 'marketed to teenagers', doesn't apply to older books because publishers didn't really start to do that until the 1950s or so. However, many older books have been retroactively considered proto-YA, and Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer are definitely among those (along with things like Alice in Wonderland and Treasure Island).

Catcher in the Rye was definitely written for adults, though, yes.

[(Anonymous)]

Regarding your last paragraph - that is interesting. The impression I always got was that teens tend to love the character when they're in their own whiny/entitled/self-centered phase, and given the popularity of bemoaning that today's kids are becoming ever more isolated and self-centered, I'd expect the reverse. Any links?

Also, what's the recent trend of opinion on Gatsby? Because pretty much everyone in that book annoyed the fuck out of me.

[nyxelestia]

NAYRT

As someone still very into YA and in touch with a lot of that market demographic, I'd say teenagers don't really seem to care too much about the whiny/entitled/self-centeredness of the main characters. Those traits just come up a lot because that's how the adult authors of these books tend to think of teenagers. (And to be honest, those traits also seem to be more of a vicious cycle rather than anything else - adults think that's what teens are like, books and movies and TV shows are made to depict teens like that, kids see and hear all this and think that's what teens are supposed to be like and so they start acting like that, reinforcing adults' beliefs which in turn influences the media kids are consuming...)

Though for Holden, yeah, I found him incredibly whiny, as did most of my friends and classmates. However, it was most in a "what an idiot/so stupidly naive" kind of way ("Yes, Holden, the world is phony, are you just figuring it out now?" "Oh, you want to protect children from the world? As if they aren't already a part of it?" "Love that mellow messiah complex you've got going there...")

And I don't know what the overall trend on Gatsby is, but most us in English class at the time I read it saw it as largely a "bubble-bursting" book about how following idealistic dreams and/or shallow pursuits makes you ignore the real world and kills your common sense, and will mostly hurt you in the end. *insert "gee, why does that sound so familiar?" jokes here*

[(Anonymous)]

" A lot of people who read it now seem to think of Holden as whiny and entitled and annoying. "

I thought that when I read it 20+ years ago.

[herongale]

I'd disagree, mostly because the entire concept of YA/Young Adult literature is a pretty recent thing. All of those books with the exception of maybe The Outsiders were written before YA as a separate genre was created by publishers, and it's pretty much more of a marketing distinction than anything else.

I do appreciate what you're saying, but books like Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Catcher in the Rye can all be found in the regular adult literature section as well, because even though the protagonists are young, the stories are consider to be universal and "timeless."