/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.23131861]

>it's a book for children
Is this a valid argument against criticism when several works were able to trascend their intended demographic?

[Anonymous No.23131879]

No and cs Lewis was a prophet

[Anonymous No.23131896]

>>23131861
Many children are more intelligent than many of the adults I interact with, including the teachers at their schools. Books "for children" after a certain age are not reduced in their intellectual capacity, but in their moral capacity, which is where children actually require the most shaping. The postmodern desire for "adult" fiction with no moral message, however, is not a universal function of literature and even a momentary glance at medieval literature will reveal a time and place where even the most intellectually nuanced, symbology laden, and historically referential works of both prose and poetry contained within them some of the element of moral education which we as serious adults look down upon today.
In today's parlance, where "adults" read the hunger games and harry potter, the difference between adult fiction and children's fiction is minimal. There is simply more or less complex, and these categories are demonstrably not age dependent.

[Anonymous No.23131949]

yes and cs lewis was a faggot

[Anonymous No.23132016]

>>23131861
>What is dual readership

[Anonymous No.23132042]

>yes and cs lewis was a faggot

[Anonymous No.23132084]

>>23131896
The classics and ever renewing favorites tend to have a strong moral component and deal with what Jones identified as things that happen on a kind of imaginative and performative level that only the ~10-13 year old crowd truly understand. They usually involve a level of magical thinking or abstraction that, let's be clear, many adults are completely void of for various reasons, if they had it in the first place.

I don't find YA doing any of that for the most part and it tends to be third generation genre fantasy with a restricted vocabulary, at least compared to what children's literature has been and still does on a functional level. You could argue that there is some moral component, but I don't "Good vs. Evil" or a rehashed hero mythos without any of the scoundrel qualities, the real vices and failings that the real heroes had, to be much more than hot air.

[Anonymous No.23132349]

>>23131861
A dismissal is just lazy and pretentìous, itis just stating that you are smarter than a child but still act like one. Criticism cannot ignore context and the intended audience is an important context which guides criticism.

[Anonymous No.23132360]

What a retarded question.

[Anonymous No.23132379]

>>23131861
higher res

[Anonymous No.23132505]

>>23132349
>Criticism cannot ignore context
It certainly can. You don't need context to evaluate a work because it's the work itself that creates it's own context.
>and the intended audience is an important context which guides criticism
No, it isn't. The audience exists independently of the work itself and vice versa.

[Anonymous No.23133296]

>>23132505
What if its the author intention to write for children? If he writes deep characters, then they would get over the children's head and the kids would get bored. Thus, the same criticism you make with a novel cannot be done to a children's book.

[Anonymous No.23133320]

>>23131861
Sure, but that would require the work to have some kind of hidden substance beyond base allegory as in LotR.

[Anonymous No.23133344]

>>23132505
>It certainly can. You don't need context to evaluate a work because it's the work itself that creates it's own context.
No, criticism can not ignore context, it can set it aside but it can not ignore it. If you analyze Winnie the Pooh as you would Joyce and use that as proof that Winnie the Pooh is shit and for stupid children you probably will not be published ever again and will become a joke. But if you analyze Winnie the Pooh as you would Joyce to explore what that say about one or the other or society, etc, then that is fine and has worth. The former is ignoring context to push an agenda and the latter offers something more than comparing apples to dog shit; apples do not keep my dog healthy or even alive but shitting does so dog shit is clearly better than apples!
>No, it isn't. The audience exists independently of the work itself and vice versa.
Same thing again, it is a context which can not be ignored but can be set aside for some purposes but not just for a dismissal. Criticism is about removing the shit flinging, academia long since grew sick of that and is why the field has almost completely given up on interpretation outside of students who still get a kick out of the fight.

Context is difficult for you, isn't it?

[Anonymous No.23134444]

>>23133296
>What if its the author intention to write for children?
You can apply the same criticism to a book for adults and a book for children because both are books, not to mention that quality transcends the author's intentions and message.
For example, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were intended for adults but they found an audience in children. On the other hand, you have The Hobbit, which was intended for children yet it found an audience within adults.
A third example is Harry Potter, which is a bad book independently of its target audience or Rowling's politics, but that still has an audience with children and millennial adults.

[Anonymous No.23134447]

>>23134444
>For example, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were intended for adults but they found an audience in children. On the other hand, you have The Hobbit, which was intended for children yet it found an audience within adults.

Some old folktales from Europe and Asia such as Bluebeard and Arabian Nights fall into this category. The Bamboo Cutter’s tale is a great example because it was originally a political satire against specific courtiers in the Japanese court but over time it lost its meaning and became the Japanese version of Snow White. The demarcation between adult and children’s lit isn’t clear cut and lazy people use “it’s for children” as a way to deflect criticism of poor writing.

[Anonymous No.23134889]

>>23133344
>criticism can not ignore context
Yes. It can, it will and it does.
I don't have to be in a library to know that a book is a book, let alone if it is for children or for adults or if the writing is good or not. All I need is the book itself to make a criticism. If a work depends on its context, then you know it's a poor quality work.
No reading the rest of your post, btw.

[Anonymous No.23134905]

>>23131861
Nothing wrong with writing a book that can be read with a little hard word from a fifth grader.
Lord of the Rings for example. Slap in some curse words and sex scenes, now it’s only meant for adults. Yet preteen me really needed LotR in a way adult me doesnt

[Anonymous No.23134911]

>>23134447
>Some old folktales from Europe and Asia such as Bluebeard and Arabian Nights fall into this category.
Pretty much all folktales were for a general audience, some being much more adult and probably bar tales, but then children were spared very little so whatever on that. Childhood was a late 18th century invention and didn't really normalize until industrialization and public education became more prevalent.

[Anonymous No.23135766]

>>23131879
Based