(urth) PF as YA

[John Watkins]

No, I didn't find Adult Chris to be sympathetic and I'm not sure I was
supposed to.  I don't really have a developed argument for that, though.

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Jonathan Goodwin <joncgoodwin at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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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