PF as YA

Mo Holkar / UKG · 16 Apr 2009, 09:19 · from 2009-April.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: lists at ukg.co.uk (Mo Holkar / UKG)
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2009 10:19:42 +0100
Subject: (urth) PF as YA
In-Reply-To: <37bfbeb60904151547o2b803698xa2dd622f75148a3e at mail.gmail.co
 m>
References: <c2e.50550f33.3717b68f at aol.com>
	<37bfbeb60904151547o2b803698xa2dd622f75148a3e at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20090416091944.1B10148008 at diego.dreamhost.com>

At 23:47 15/04/2009, Jonathan Goodwin wrote:
>I know that "didactic" has a pejorative connotation in many
>circumstances (which might be derived from New Critical orthodoxy, at
>least in part); but I meant it only descriptively.

It seems to me likely that Wolfe means all of his work to have a 
didactic element (in that descriptive sense). Otherwise, what would 
be the moral purpose of writing it?

And to go back to your slightly earlier question -- while Chris 
surely isn't held up as a moral exemplar, he does seem to me to be 
portrayed sympathetically, and his exploits laid out in such a way 
that instruction might be drawn from them. So this might be a more 
sophisticated take on the identify-with protagonist of simplistically 
didactic YA. I'm not an expert, but I'm sure there must be a 
tradition of other such in the YA canon.

Mo

# ~ # ~ #

WolfeWiki -- a wiki about Gene Wolfe
http://www.wolfewiki.com/pmwiki/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net