One aspect of the final film in the trilogy, Ong Bak 3, to which I keep returning is the relationship between classical Thai dancing, prayer, healing, and martial arts. Pim's dance in front of the temple while Tien is healing from the brutal torture he received from Lord Rajasena's men moves me tremendously. Every position, every motion is so precise. Pim invests herself so wholly in the dance. I can feel the dance-as-prayer and measure its effectiveness, its genuineness, its heartfelt urgency by the technical perfection of the performance.
What does this have to do with anything? I feel a need to unravel the problem of the function of art as a prerequisite to justifying my personal approach to YA literature. My heart belongs to Oscar Wilde and his aestheticism, his belief in art for its own sake, his dismissal of utilitarian concerns. But I recognize that this, and other similarly Decadent approaches, comes from a place of privilege and comfort not experienced by vast numbers of people. It is a white male thing. Or is it?
0 Comments
My one-year-old loves "Thomas and Friends," a toy model-based television series about living trains who strive to be useful for a rich capitalist on a British island. Something never sat quite right with me about the series, despite its narration by favorite comedian George Carlin. Imagine my surprise, or don't, when a Google search for "Thomas and Friends Marxist critique" came back with several hits: Slate's "Thomas the Imperialist Tank Engine" from 2011, The Guardian's "Thomas the Tank Engine had to shut the hell up to save children everywhere" from 2014, and the New Yorker's "The Repressive, Authoritarian Soul of 'Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends'" for instance. Sir Topham Hat as robber baron teaches trains and children that they must be "really useful engines" to have any worth at all. Since the barrage of criticism, the show has apparently been "shunted down the left track," angering conservatives with its "Marxist undertones." This revelation dovetails with the rabbit hole into which I've recently dived concerning pure vs. applied literary criticism and young adult literature.
There is a delicious irony in using Marxist criticism (an applied criticism) to point out the death of play in literary exploration. Play is the distinguishing element between the two approaches to literature, I think. Applied criticism seeks to establish that a work is "good for something," that it serves a purpose. Articles on how to use YA literature for this or that fall into this category: awakening empathy or fighting patriarchy as well as more traditional pedagogical concerns. Marxists don't decry the concept of being "really useful," after all. They only demand that one be useful (or at the very least, not harmful) to the right people: in this case, the workers. The other two critical theories Randy Ribay suggests we teach high school kids--feminism and postcolonialism--similarly demand that one be useful to women and indigenous peoples. There is nothing wrong with this: public education has multiple purposes--among them, to create good citizens, and good citizens care about equity and justice. |
AuthorJeffrey Babbitt, MLIS, is a graduate of the School of Library and Information Science at Wayne State University who is pursuing a career as a librarian in Michigan. Subject Headings
All
Inter- Library Loan004.02020025.431027.62090813.009Archives
June 2021
|