Our summer assignment going into HISP freshman year was The Dark is Rising, a book that almost nobody in our class liked. The class was prepared when we confronted and questioned our teacher about the [boring, binary, blech] book. We suggested other options such as The Hunger Games series, which the vast majority of the class had both read and enjoyed. To our astonishment, our teacher replied by saying that The Dark is Rising is a 9th-grade level book, and that Suzanne Collin's beloved series ranked far below our detested summer reading both comprehension-wise and thematically. He continued by saying the action is faster-paced in The Hunger Games. According to the teacher, Collins wrote typical teen tropes (sex, violence) without any deeper meaning.
My question then is if we are sacrificing "quality literature" for mindless entertainment. What we read today is what we read last year or the year before -- action churned out for the sake of action, cold and mechanical. Are we interested in such media only because we don't have to think? We know the skeleton of the story (someone close to the main character dies but they will ultimately prevail).
I would disagree with my teacher's analysis because, while action might be overused today, at least today's media is mostly pithy and succinct. Older books and movies incessantly use tedious monologues or page-long descriptions of the sunny sky. What do you think? Are modern books and TV truly examples of the dark media that is rising in our society?
or
?
or
?
While many modern TV shows and books are shallow and trivial I think that in general modern works are more likely to be labelled as underdeveloped or shallow. Underdeveloped, sensational media made to appeal isn't new, look at notorious penny dreadfuls in Victorian UK. But this type of media is so widespread, at the forefront of our culture, that I think modern works get devalued as a whole. Just because something was written before the Internet or television was invented doesn't mean it's a classic and just because something was written in the 21st Century and uses violence or other tropes doesn't automatically make it mindless, garbage literature. But I think people are much more likely to romanticize the past and older novels/authors than modern ones, perhaps because of the overbearing presence of the truly mindless entertainers in today's culture.
ReplyDelete