I’ve said a number of harsh things here about the bad attitude of people who consider themselve Intellectuals toward math and science. After reading this New Yorker discussion about a Young Adult novel, I may need to change my stance a bit.
It’s not that they’re better than expected when it comes to math and science– the subject never comes up. The mind-changing thing is their really appalling ignorance of and attitude toward YA books. It’s really pretty amazing. And if somebody said things in public that were half as insulting to teenage girls as what they say about teenage boys, they’d be run out of their job as President of Harvard.
The Caitlin Flanagan piece about Twilight isn’t a whole lot better. Seriously, people, read some Scott Westerfeld or something.
I should really stop reading stuff that pisses me off like this. It’s like a train wreck, though– I can’t help looking.
I found this post a little cryptic; maybe I haven’t been reading your blog long enough. But I’m curious, what exactly is your critique of the Flanagan piece? I read it too, and have my own issues, but I’d be interested in you spelling out yours…
Ah, you hate postmodernists too! Join the club.
I’d say we in science are more ‘intellectual’.
I don’t think a grasp of arts or music is necessary at all to be, ah, ‘well-rounded’; history is useful for knowing crap that’s already been done, philosophy is useful for honing one’s thinking skills, math is central to many sciences, et cetera, but really, I think the liberal arts are really mostly subsumed to science in terms of importance.
We have to get rid of postmodernism first. Pomos are as bad as fundies.
Maybe if Krajeski read more, she’d know what “begs the question” means.
Just saying.
I found this post a little cryptic; maybe I haven’t been reading your blog long enough. But I’m curious, what exactly is your critique of the Flanagan piece? I read it too, and have my own issues, but I’d be interested in you spelling out yours…
I had a problem with her claim that YA books were always and essentially about the era of the author’s childhood. That may be true of the Twilight books (I haven’t read them), which she knocks for not having cell phones or email integrated into the characters’ lives, but it’s not remotely true of YA as a whole. Westerfeld’s contemporary YA books (So Yesterday is probably the best example) do a really good job of nailing the contemporary voice (at least at the time when they were written– culture moves fast).
Pretty much any sweeping generalization about a broad genre like YA books is going to be wrong. Twilight may be the phenomenon of the moment, but that doesn’t mean it’s all that there is to the field.
She also had a whole lot of stuff about how YA books are uniqely suited to girls, but it was more personalized than in the New Yorker thing, so it didn’t annoy me as much.
Chad–
I haven’t read your blog before, coming in from the scienceblogs main page.
I saw the link to the earlier discussion on math and science. I think there’s a lot of stuff you missed, but probably some folks hit it in the comments. (I was one who crossed over from being a physics major to being a literature major, with a strong background in linguistics and languages, both human and computer, tho the latter was long enough ago that everything I know is rather quaint).
I’m not so sure what your critique of the critique of YA fiction has to do with the old “two cultures” problem.
The linked essays on YA novels seem to me to point out certain things about the relevant books, some of which I agreed with and some not. I do think the idea that YA novels have been overwhelmingly marketed to teen girls isn’t wrong. I also think the Twighlight books are playing into some very old-fashioned stereotypes. Compare them to U.K. LeGuin’s work — often marketed as YA — and you will see what I mean. More importantly, I haven’t even read Twighlight and I can tell you the major plot points/devices. To me, that’s the mark of inferior literature.
Now, I have read a fair bit of what would now be called “YA” fiction in my time. So a lot of the tropes may just be all too familiar these days, in a way they would not be if I were 15 again.
I grew up on S.E. Hinton and Judy Blume, and I’d categorize a lot of Piers Anthony as YA-oriented fiction, as the Xanth novels don’t have anything beyond PG – rated stuff in them. For me it was LeGuin and Asimov who made me think that those others weren’t worth it anymore. I was about 12-13 at the time.
(I still remember books with no pictures I got as a gift. Christmas, 1979 or 1980. They were Fantastic Voyage, A Spell For Chameleon, Foundation and Empire and Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids. Around the same time I read The Winged Man by A.E. Van Vogt, Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock, Empire of Two Worlds by the late Barrington J. Bayley. Most of these would probably class as YA fiction now. For me, the interesting thing was most were a lot longer than S.E. Hinton or Blume, and the ideas seemed far more expansive — we were reading Blume in school and while I ate up many of her books, she lost out pretty quick).
Young adult fiction is, like most genre fiction, much better reading than serious literature. Look at the assumptions in the New Yorker blither – good literature has to be hard to read, hard to understand, arbitrarily unpredictable and cannot take an unambiguous point of view. Yes, people with literary pretensions consider genre fiction well beneath them, but the revenge is at the bookstores. No one reads serious literature, but they do read genre fiction.
It was like this in the music business until recently. Country music was given little respect until Soundscan started producing and publicizing the actual sales figures. I’m more of a reader than a music fan, but similar class and in group mechanisms are at work.
Flanagan’s piece is about Flanagan, so I have to cut her some slack. Different people come into adulthood, or not, in different ways.
I live in Port Angeles and often get out to Forks, so I know that Twilight has had an impact. For instance, it can really sell mushroom ravioli at Bella Italia. Forks is an old lumber town, and it’s in terrible shape economically. The big attractions are the Hoh Rain Forest, the West End beaches and now Twilight. You can tell the fans, largely teen-aged girls, by their distinctive “vampire” dress. It’s hard not to think about The Mayerling and its take on teen angst. It looks like fun, and it’s kind of charming.
David Mamet, the playwright, says that demonstrating real world expertise is a good way to connect with the audience. It pays to do some research about the restaurant wholesale business, or culturing roses, fixing motorcycles, or proving mathematical theorems. A display of such knowledge and familiarity makes it easier for the person watching your play to enter the world. Most good authors, even fantasy and science fiction authors, do research, think and display the results. Literary critics are under no such obligation.