Great article! Scatology, didn't know that word, glad I do now. The culture wars seem to really be punishing childrens literature. Or perhaps as much is the change in which the most "successful" children's writers are not writers, but celebrities holding the reader hostage in their particular moral vision. And we've also become really focused on "representation" in characters and I'm curious about your thoughts on that. If a child's connection to a character is assumed to be "you look like this character, adopt all their virtue" it seems to miss the opportunity to identify with some type of otherness , whatever that may be (physical, moral, circumstantial) and grow. One of my favorite movies growing up was the sandlot, and the movie did not need a girl in the gang for girls to love it, it would have been fundamentally changed, and that story could be told but as it's own thing (bad news bears?)
I was a bit too young for The Sandlot, but I had a similar experience with The Goonies :-)
The shallow trend around "identification" is one of the more idiotic things to come out of our current culture wars. Like most culture war items, there is a minor item somewhere at the center of the storm of rhetoric where a ghost of a point lurks.
In my book The Secrets of the Heinlein Juvenile I look at a major turning point in children's literature, where challenging ideas became a normal part of the story experience where previously themes of grappling with the adult world on an existential level had been fairly taboo. I also talk about what happened later, as YA literature stopped being written for young teens and started being written to flatter the vanity of middle-aged audiences on a nostalgia kick.
Great essay, Daniel. Read it twice—and that’s probably not enough.
You might petition the gods of Substack to suggest the following rule when formatting articles: Footnotes should be in square brackets (“[ ]”) immediately following the text to which they are attached. When reading a substantial essay like yours—at least 20 screenloads—reading a footnote and then finding your way back becomes burdensome.
But Substack has a niftier trick than that: if you mouse-over the footnote it appears in a lottle pop up windiw--you can read it without ever clicking on it
Great article! Scatology, didn't know that word, glad I do now. The culture wars seem to really be punishing childrens literature. Or perhaps as much is the change in which the most "successful" children's writers are not writers, but celebrities holding the reader hostage in their particular moral vision. And we've also become really focused on "representation" in characters and I'm curious about your thoughts on that. If a child's connection to a character is assumed to be "you look like this character, adopt all their virtue" it seems to miss the opportunity to identify with some type of otherness , whatever that may be (physical, moral, circumstantial) and grow. One of my favorite movies growing up was the sandlot, and the movie did not need a girl in the gang for girls to love it, it would have been fundamentally changed, and that story could be told but as it's own thing (bad news bears?)
I was a bit too young for The Sandlot, but I had a similar experience with The Goonies :-)
The shallow trend around "identification" is one of the more idiotic things to come out of our current culture wars. Like most culture war items, there is a minor item somewhere at the center of the storm of rhetoric where a ghost of a point lurks.
In my book The Secrets of the Heinlein Juvenile I look at a major turning point in children's literature, where challenging ideas became a normal part of the story experience where previously themes of grappling with the adult world on an existential level had been fairly taboo. I also talk about what happened later, as YA literature stopped being written for young teens and started being written to flatter the vanity of middle-aged audiences on a nostalgia kick.
You might dig it.
Great essay, Daniel. Read it twice—and that’s probably not enough.
You might petition the gods of Substack to suggest the following rule when formatting articles: Footnotes should be in square brackets (“[ ]”) immediately following the text to which they are attached. When reading a substantial essay like yours—at least 20 screenloads—reading a footnote and then finding your way back becomes burdensome.
Hilariously that's how I write them. :-)
But Substack has a niftier trick than that: if you mouse-over the footnote it appears in a lottle pop up windiw--you can read it without ever clicking on it
Wow Daniel. Really rattling the cages with this one. :)
*looks around innocently*
Me? Rattle cages? Never! ;-)