Forum Index
»
Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)
“Stuff Some Adults Don’t Want You to Read” at Langley
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
Beloved had only slightly better writing than the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition, but did have more titillation. |
Anonymous
|
Anonymous
LOL, it won a Pulitzer and was a National Book Award finalist, but I’m sure you know better. |
Anonymous
The narrative style in Beloved is straight out of 80's cheesefest "Highlander" jumping around in time and space so much and blending multiple viewpoints that the reader might as well be riding in the TARDIS. Beloved depicts rape and violence towards women, described in such detail, so often, as to cause a reader to wonder if Toni was really condemning it, or if this "feminist" had some sort of bizarre masochistic fetish? Feminist fiction has often left me wondering that. Honestly, Toni Morrison's novels seem more like an attempt to shock, stupefy, and play mind games with her readers than to actually tell stories. |
Anonymous
Because suburban mommies threw temper tantrums and screeched about how they were “forced” to become one issue voters because their kids had virtual learning during a pandemic. |
Anonymous
Sure. And slavery was actually a good things for slaves. They were never raped or beaten or brutalized. |
Anonymous
|
The laughable thing here is that parents who are secure in their own values don’t fear their children being exposed to books. They are not afraid to talk to their children about new ideas, and are not afraid of having in their values challenged. The parents who want to prevent their kids from reading these books are the ones who know, deep down, that their own values are wrong.
Let’s get real. The people opposed to Gender Queer aren’t worried their kids will be traumatized by a drawing, they’re afraid their kids will catch the LGBTQ. |
Anonymous
No, honey, YOU are the minority in the school district. I know you think otherwise, since All Your Privileged Friends agree with you and you live in a self-created echo chamber, but You. Are. Wrong. |
Anonymous
What does that have to do with the quality of Toni Morrison's writing? Toni attempts to manipulate the reader in an obvious manner with zero subtly whatsoever. She may as well write on the cover " I am trying to make you feel dumber than I am! " Unfortunately for Toni, if a reader knows you're trying to manipulate them, no amount of style, imagery, or endorsements from critics is going to work. There is a saying-"A tactic known is a tactic blown". Try reading her other works and you can see the same tricks at play right away. |
Anonymous
But doesn't it also go both ways? I don't support the R or the L banning as a matter of principle. It's the whole first amendment - you have to allow speech you don't like to protect the speech you do like - because we don't want what is able to be said to depend on who happens to be the arbiter because it could be an arbiter we don't like. But anyway - I don't get my panties in a twist if books are banned either - because it's not going to affect my kids - and it does happen on both the right and the left. They can still read whatever the hell they want, and I also teach them critical thinking and to have a healthy distrust of authority 
The people who are really against censorship should be coming out against the censorship on the left too - and there have been plenty of articles linked about that here. |
Anonymous
I struggle to make sense of Beloved, but it's worth the exercise. And I thing I suspect is that there's no group of parents less qualified to weigh in on the merits of Toni Morrison's style than Langley parents. They may know a few things about stock options and carried interest, but they aren't exactly a literary crowd. |
Anonymous
It sounds like it makes you very uncomfortable to contemplate the realities of slavery. |
Anonymous
I didn’t advocate for any censorship. Your post is nothing but whataboutism designed distract from the weaknesses in your own position. |
Anonymous
I'm of the opinion that if you want a better story to explore a story from multiple viewpoints at a high school level, you're better off reading Rashomon. The truth is that the stream of racial consciousness interlude in Beloved is a display piece, a verbal stunt that is connected to the rest of the novel by the thinnest of fictions. As well as by Morrison's ambition to leave a monument to the suffering caused by black slavery. |
Anonymous
Not at all. Her odd spacing and lack of punctuation, the fragmented phrases, are little more than an attempt to defamiliarize what are, to be honest, scenes and images that have been familiar since the first photographs of Hitler’s death camps were published in the United States. The dead, heaped in a pile, are nothing new. Only her typography is new. She is definitely one of the least impressive of the American Nobel laureates. Setting her side by side with Lewis or O'Neill or Faulkner or Steinbeck or Hemingway demonstrates that very quickly. Beyond her novels, I read also two books of her essays (for a total of nine books) and have yet to be impressed by much of anything. Comparing her with some of her fellow black American authors also is instructive. Hurston, Walker, and Baldwin definitely outshine her. In my opinion, the 12 pages of Baldwin's "My Dungeon Shook" are better than anything in the thousands of pages of Morrison. And Baldwin does it repeatedly. (He is the one who should be a Nobel laureate.) Frankly, I don't think people will be reading much from her in a generation. They will, however, still be reading Baldwin, Faulkner, Hurston, Hemingway, Walker, and Steinbeck. |