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points by madrox 6 hours ago | 0 comments
To the article's point, I grew up in the 80s. Even though I lived a different life from Tom and Huck it wasn't so different that I couldn't relate to it. I wonder how many more generations we can go before that's all gone, or if it already has. There's still a lot of value in it as a work of literature, but I don't know if it has the same intuitive understanding it had in the 20th century.

I don't think that's a bad thing. We shouldn't put the past on a pedestal, but it makes me wonder who the Tom Sawyer of the 21st century is. I just hope it isn't Katniss Everdeen or Edward Cullen.

[–] stevenwoo 5 hours ago
I doubt a few decades of time is going to make much literature so much harder to understand. Just a little bit of historical context and background on currency values is enough to read and comprehend stuff back to Shakespeare where viewers and readers can instantly recognize the human foibles in fictional characters from centuries ago. Translations are a different beast where it’s a collaboration between translators and original author but there are many subplots in say Don Quixote that would not be out of place in media as different as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia to many romcom movies(I picked the oldest novel I could think of, The Iliad and Odyssey can work though translation does a lot of heavy lifting in those cases for majority of readers).
[–] breakyerself 3 hours ago
I loved Mark Twain when I was a kid. Read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn multiple times. I didn't even consider reading it to my kid when she was younger. Wasn't a good way to handle all the N words.
[–] lukan 4 hours ago
" I just hope it isn't Katniss Everdeen or Edward Cullen."

How about Harry Potter?

Well, all of those have in common that they are fantasy and not really connected to this reality, while Tom Sawyer was a fictional adventure in reality.

[–] Razengan 1 hour ago
Harry Potter was published before 2000, and is upped by Diana Wynne Jones' Chrestomanci in every way.

I'd rather have one of the Baginses (not the Sackville mind you)

[–] ctmlr 4 hours ago
Times change but people don't.
[–] TFNA 4 hours ago
The way people interact has definitely changed with the times. Whole plots of twentieth-century fiction and cinema would now be unlikely or impossible in the smartphone era, for instance.
[–] nkrisc 4 hours ago
Sure, the plot devices might be rendered moot by technological change but the underlying motivations remain the same.

Technology has changed, but humans haven’t.

[–] TFNA 4 hours ago
I'm not sure about that, either. It's common to see Gen Z made uncomfortable by the intense flirtation and amorous pursuit shown in so much classic cinema, because that kind of sexual behavior is declining in developed countries (plausibly due to, among other factors, the ready availability of porn as a way to blow off steam, and the greater risk in the social-media age of getting one's reputation tarred if an advance proves unwelcome).
[–] ctmlr 2 hours ago
Cultural ages of relative sexual liberation and suppression is normal too. It's a material world so yeah there are material causes, but the way people are and respond to those pressures never change because we're still the same creatures as we were hundreds of thousands of years ago.
[–] b33l 2 hours ago
I'm struggling to imagine how that's common to see
[–] Razengan 1 hour ago
True. Just look at the graffiti in Pompeii and by Romans on the pyramids etc.
[–] embedding-shape 6 hours ago
I'm going out on a limb perhaps, but I think what makes people be able to relate or not is more up to the person reading the book and story, than what the book and story actually is. Sometimes me and others read the same book, both feel like we can relate to it, even if it's very old and in reality far from our reality, and we both relate to it in different ways. I'd be willing to bet that 100 years from now, people will read contemporary stories set in today and some will see nothing, others will recognize themselves somehow.