Sunday, February 17, 2008
Bronx Masquerade not so Bronx??
Several interesting topics were discussed this week during our class on African American Children’s Literature and the book Bronx Masquerade. One topic I found particularly interesting dealt with the language of the book. The question was brought up of whether or not the language portrayed in the book gave an accurate representation of how high school students in the Bronx talk?! In my opinion the language is far too clean and is in no way truly authentic to the high school environment. Now there might be an innocent intention in this depiction. Would this book have been published or win any diversity awards if it contained curse words? Probably not! However, I wonder which is more important: accurate language depiction or curse word free literature? Now I am in no way advocating the obnoxious use of offensive curse words around young children. Yet, curse words are a very realistic aspect of young culture, especially in high schools. Just walk down the halls of any high school in-between classes and you will know what I mean. I believe this book gives readers a false sense of what goes on in an inner city high school by leaving out any dirty language usage. Therefore, I believe it fails to accurately represent the life and struggles of African American students in the Bronx. I believe adding some instances of curse filled language would make the book more realistic and passionate. The language is definitely not extreme enough!
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I totally agree with you! Something that we have discussed thorughout the semester is the authenticity of literature, and I think that taking all of the swear words out of this makes this literature less authentic. While I do agree that to include the amount of swearing that probably does occur in schools would be over the top, the complete elimintation of it from the book makes it seem unrealistic. If we contiually talk about how it is important to present authentic literature can we really condone this book as being good, quality literature? While obviously it was written by an insider author, does this mean that it is perfect and that we should just accpet it because of that? I don't think so! I think that an effort should be made to make stories as accurate as possible while maintaining a level of prevention so that the stories are appropriate for children. This being said, it is much easier said than done. However, I think that as consumers we should contine to push authors to make stories as authentic as possible!
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