so called "Old Literature"

[osho]

Of course there is a philosophical problem when it comes to drawing a conclusion or making a point of judgement. Slavery were the norms at some epochs in time and the literature of the time justified it as it graded humans into the master and the servant based on their birth of nobility or lowliness. They had the belief that people born of a prosperous family has to do with their Karma and it is indeed their Dharma to satisfy themselves where they are in and serve those who were considered their masters.

When we look at this old literary source we scorn at the very foundation of their thoughts or their philosophical roots.

[kiki1982]

I suppose the real problems start where you get a modern author setting a story in the past, and taking their modern attitudes with them. So you may get a white woman brought up in the pre-war deep south with impeccable modern attitudes towards racial equality, or a secular medieval philosopher. A character out of context. It is a kind of arrogance, a "we know best"ism, and is more prevelent than it used to be. Many books say more about the times of the writer, than the times it is supposed to be set in.

Haha, those are exactly my thoughts! Authors of historic novels never quite get it right. I guess it's not their fault though, they don't know any better. Everyone is a child of their time. I'm sure I could find some inconcsistencies in PD James's Death comes to Pemberley, despite her reverence for Austen and the evident knowledge she has of the era.

Considering that arrogance. I agree. Who is to say that in 50 years, maybe 200 years, those people will not look back at the novels written now and say, 'Tssss, how [fill in biased social issue] those people were!' Yes, we have different ideas, but it's not worth thinking about whose are superior, it's merely about the differences.

[osho]

Haha, those are exactly my thoughts! Authors of historic novels never quite get it right. I guess it's not their fault though, they don't know any better. Everyone is a child of their time. I'm sure I could find some inconcsistencies in PD James's Death comes to Pemberley, despite her reverence for Austen and the evident knowledge she has of the era.

Considering that arrogance. I agree. Who is to say that in 50 years, maybe 200 years, those people will not look back at the novels written now and say, 'Tssss, how [fill in biased social issue] those people were!' Yes, we have different ideas, but it's not worth thinking about whose are superior, it's merely about the differences.

Values go with respect to time and time will fizzle out or devalue things we esteem now. Interests change and so do the philosophy of life and writing. Shakespeare's main objective was to entertain Tolstoy wrote to educate.

[PeterL]

Of course there is a philosophical problem when it comes to drawing a conclusion or making a point of judgement. Slavery were the norms at some epochs in time and the literature of the time justified it as it graded humans into the master and the servant based on their birth of nobility or lowliness. They had the belief that people born of a prosperous family has to do with their Karma and it is indeed their Dharma to satisfy themselves where they are in and serve those who were considered their masters.

When we look at this old literary source we scorn at the very foundation of their thoughts or their philosophical roots.

I don't scorn their thoughts. For example, slavery was not just allowed in the Bible, but it was approved by that god, so it is clear that they would accept and approve of slavery. That is just one of a great many older customs that have gone out of use. We probably should pay more attention to the older works.

[prendrelemick]

Acouple of points...

Interesting questions, Hannah, especially the last part. I used to think that works of literature should be assessed (I don't like the word 'criticised', it has too many negative connotations) purely on its own merits. While I still shy away from trying to use a text to surmise something about the author's life or state of mind, I now think no work should be taken in isolation. Everything, to my way of thinking, is part of a whole, part of the Zeitgeist, if you like, and the more a reader understands about the period in which the work was written, the more likely it is that he/she will come close to understanding the writer's intentions.

In fact, I think it is quite dangerous to read any 'old' work with modern sensibilities alone - and by 'old', I'd certainly include anything more than twenty, or even ten, years old. In case you are thinking I'm being too stringent in my timing, let me suggest to you that you think for example about the changes in attitudes to money as recently as 2008 following the financial crises that began in the autumn of that year. As for social attitudes, when I was a child, (granted a long time ago,) the word 'divorce' was whispered in hushed and shamed tones. It seems to me that unless you have some understanding of the mores of the time the book/play/treatise was written, you will not fully understand the work.

It's odd but the nearer we are to the time the book was written in, the more out of date it seems. Probably because we don't expect it to be.

Reading old literature is a great fascination since it wings our imagination far and wide in terms of space and time. I read today a little of life on the Mississippi by Marktwain, the old American classic novelist and I got moved and absorbed in the beauty and grandiloquent style he had written with and of course it is to old literature that I must turn to if I have to broaden my literary horizon and of course there is a great storehouse of ideas in old literature.

New literature has yet to summit the heights they have scaled and I really take pride in the fact that I have immensely read old literature, more than new ones

Mark Twain is a good case in point. The word "Nigger" has been removed from the text in the latest edition for schools. I agree it is an offensive word and sharn't use it again here. But for his day, Twain's works were as progressive and as racially inclusive as you would find anywhere. He had no other word he could use at that time, it is what his characters would say. That is context and you need to know it when reading Huck Finn.

[hannah_arendt]

Recently I have bought "The castle of Otranto" and I am going to read it soon. However I have so many books to read that sometimes I don`t know which one choose.

[hannah_arendt]

Acouple of points...



It's odd but the nearer we are to the time the book was written in, the more out of date it seems. Probably because we don't expect it to be.



Mark Twain is a good case in point. The word "Nigger" has been removed from the text in the latest edition for schools. I agree it is an offensive word and sharn't use it again here. But for his day, Twain's works were as progressive and as racially inclusive as you would find anywhere. He had no other word he could use at that time, it is what his characters would say. That is context and you need to know it when reading Huck Finn.

I think that we shouldn`t remove any words from the texts.

[JCamilo]

The great narratives do not have the text fixed on the stone, hannah. (Albeit, the chage on Twain did no good, was rejected and in the end instead of calling a black man by a pejorative name used to call slaves, called a free black man by slave, which is as offensive or more).

[PeterL]

I think that we shouldn`t remove any words from the texts.

I strongly agree. Part of the allure of reading older works is seeing how a language has changed. Less than 100 years ago the word "nigger" was not pejorative; it was just one of the several words for dark skinned people. Alas, some people found it offensive, and we get the foolishness of pulling it out of a good novel.

[JCamilo]

The word nigger was pejorative, it was the reading public, white, that wasn't aware of this.

[kiki1982]

The word nigger was pejorative, it was the reading public, white, that wasn't aware of this.

As the public wasn't aware of the word being pejorative, it wasn't pejoritive therefore, was it. That's the whole point of language. Languages are not absolute things and words change their connotations. Hence the word 'nigger' was not found pejorative. It only became that when people started to avoid the word and use another instead (euphemism), maybe because they were embarrassed, maybe because they didn't approve of those who did say 'nigger'. Thus, the small group of non-approvers grew and the word 'nigger' became synonymous with those who did approve of black people's reduced value, racial quality and the like and thus the word got that connotation.

We shouldn't confuse our perception of issues, words and what-not with their historic meanings.

[PeterL]

The word nigger was pejorative, it was the reading public, white, that wasn't aware of this.

You are mistaken. First, for something to be pejorative, there must be intent. If the speaker or writer of a word does not intend it in a negative sense, then it is not pejorative. Second, nigger was not even a nasty term for dark skinned people until the 1950's. It could have been used as a nasty term as any word can be, but it simply was not.

[Calidore]

You are mistaken. First, for something to be pejorative, there must be intent. If the speaker or writer of a word does not intend it in a negative sense, then it is not pejorative. Second, nigger was not even a nasty term for dark skinned people until the 1950's. It could have been used as a nasty term as any word can be, but it simply was not.

That raises an interesting question of intent vs. reception. Is the word not offensive if the speaker doesn't consider it so but knows the target does and will be offended regardless? Seems to me that if the speaker knows the target will be offended, and uses the word anyway, telling himself, "It doesn't bother me, therefore nothing's wrong with it whatever he thinks", that's more self-absorbed arrogance than anything else.

Also, I'd argue that it was considered pejorative much earlier than the 1950s. The original title of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None was changed for its 1940 U.S. publication for that reason.

[islandclimber]

You are mistaken. First, for something to be pejorative, there must be intent. If the speaker or writer of a word does not intend it in a negative sense, then it is not pejorative. Second, nigger was not even a nasty term for dark skinned people until the 1950's. It could have been used as a nasty term as any word can be, but it simply was not.

Sorry, you are mistaken. It was considered pejorative much earlier than the 1950s. In fact, from a Washington Post publication on the term:

In A Treatise on the Intellectual Character and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the United States: and the Prejudice Exercised Towards Them (1837), Hosea Easton wrote that nigger "is an opprobrious term, employed to impose contempt upon [blacks] as an inferior race. . . . The term in itself would be perfectly harmless were it used only to distinguish one class of society from another; but it is not used with that intent. . . . [I]t flows from the fountain of purpose to injure." Easton averred that often the earliest instruction white adults gave to white children prominently featured the word nigger. Adults reprimanded them for being "worse than niggers," for being "ignorant as niggers," for having "no more credit than niggers"; they disciplined them by telling them that unless they behaved they would be carried off by "the old nigger" or made to sit with "niggers" or consigned to the "nigger seat," which was, of course, a place of shame.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...ap1/nigger.htm

And in 1904, Clifton Johnson (journalist) wrote about the opprobrious nature of the word, emphasizing it was used in the South precisely because it was more offensive than "coloured." Even the 1909 founding of the "National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People" shows that their preference for racial identity was "coloured" and not "nigger."

It was the 1950s and 60s when "Black" became the preferred racial identifier. "Nigger" had been considered offensive for at least 50 years, if not 100, by that point. It was certainly used pejoratively, with an intent to offend from around the turn of the century.

It is somewhat offensive to read misinformation being put forth about this term and how "harmless" or "innocent" it was just 60 years ago. This notion is categorically false. I suggest a little research before making such a claim.

[JCamilo]

You are mistaken. First, for something to be pejorative, there must be intent. If the speaker or writer of a word does not intend it in a negative sense, then it is not pejorative. Second, nigger was not even a nasty term for dark skinned people until the 1950's. It could have been used as a nasty term as any word can be, but it simply was not.

Mark Twain used it as pejorative already. It was a term to describe black slaves and he uses it to describe the behaviour of those who cannot see Jim more than an object. The obvious implication that is a being of inferior condition is all there.

And no, it was received as pejorative. The offense is in the ear of the receptor as well, after all, no theory of that describes the communicative process lay all production of significance on the person uttering the message.

Kiki:

Read well what I said: it was the reading public, white, that wasn't aware of this. The africans were well aware of this, but they are not part of the reading public, as slaves, they had no education. Do not mix the limitations of perception of a public plus the lack of power and expression of another with historical revisionism. The white population discovered that the africans felt bad with the word, it is not just a simplistic guilty feeling. It was a result of african-americans incorporation to america society, do not try to make it also a process of the white population.