Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
Just "a little"? I'm shocked. 
Further more, this being a book club, we often discuss books in more depth that merely whether we liked it or not. As such it should never be out of place to discuss the values represented in the book as seen from our current perspective. Such gems as Anne of Green Gables and Tarzan of the Apes have been treated to such analysis, and there seems no reason to treat this book any differently. |
A Fair point.
It is just that I get very, very tired of, it seems like, every author I liked growing up being labelled as some kind of "...ist". There is often either an element of virtue signalling in these claims and /or an implication that no one should read them because of the claims.
Having followed up the origin of some of these claims, I found it was due to academics, critics or political activists (or some combination) wanting to get attention for one reason or another and their arguments were, I felt, very shaky. Example the author uses a streotyped view of "XXXXX" who is the villain, and often uses "XXXXX" as a villain. My response "are you saying an "XXXXX" cannot be a villain?".
Terry Pratchet gives an example in "The Hogfather". This contains a character Mrs. Huggs, who thinks of herself as a "Lady of refinement". She collects folk songs and runs a choir and one of the songs they sing is “The red rosy hen greets the dawn of the day.”. This has the following footnote.
"“The red rosy hen greets the dawn of the day.” In fact the hen is not the bird traditionally associated with heralding a new sunrise, but Mrs. Huggs, while collecting many old folk songs for posterity, has taken care to rewrite them where necessary to avoid, as she put it, “offending those of a refined disposition with unwarranted coarseness.” Much to her surprise, people often couldn’t spot the unwarranted coarseness until it had been pointed out to them.
Sometimes a chicken is nothing but a bird."