PF as YA

Jonathan Goodwin · 16 Apr 2009, 17:40 · from 2009-April.txt.gz

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From: joncgoodwin at gmail.com (Jonathan Goodwin)
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2009 12:40:50 -0500
Subject: (urth) PF as YA
In-Reply-To: <20090416091944.1B10148008 at diego.dreamhost.com>
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Message-ID: <37bfbeb60904161040v5db718e8j1755eee5167937df at mail.gmail.com>

I think by the time that he's writing his narrative, in America, as a
traditionalist priest, he is meant to be a wholly sympathetic
character by Wolfe. I do not find him so, for any number of reasons,
but my feeling is that Wolfe does intend him to be. I solicit other
reactions to this, from those of you who read the book and still care.

Also, about the wiki, while I have you on the horn here: The "Seven
American Nights" entry ends with the following line:

"It shows us that Americans could behave as horribly as the
third-world people they look down on, were the roles reversed. "

I know it's a wiki, etc.; but is that what whoever wrote it really meant to say?

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 4:19 AM, Mo Holkar / UKG <lists at ukg.co.uk> wrote:
> 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/
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