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PF as YA

brunians at brunians.org · 16 Apr 2009, 18:41 · from 2009-April.txt.gz

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From: brunians at brunians.org (brunians at brunians.org)
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:41:51 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: (urth) PF as YA
In-Reply-To: <37bfbeb60904161040v5db718e8j1755eee5167937df at mail.gmail.com>
References: <c2e.50550f33.3717b68f at aol.com>
	<37bfbeb60904151547o2b803698xa2dd622f75148a3e at mail.gmail.com>
	<20090416091944.1B10148008 at diego.dreamhost.com>
	<37bfbeb60904161040v5db718e8j1755eee5167937df at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <6834.67.142.130.24.1239907311.squirrel at brunians.org>

Now why do you dislike him as a modern priest, because he thinks children
should be taught to violently resist sexual predation? Someone else was on
about that, they thought that it was 'blaming the victim', something I
don't see.



.


> 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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