Should books with outdated views be re-written ?

Post Reply New Topic

If you expand this to a wider concept of historic remnants, my city recently had a number of iconic monuments removed because they were loosely linked to slavery and racism.

I have mixed feelings about the removals. On one hand I agree that those serve no purpose in our modern society, but on the other hand they weren't replaced with anything worthwhile either. And I was just used to seeing them.

At the two extremes, it's up to authors or the public.

First extreme: an author gets to an older age than when they wrote the book. The book looks outdated now and is problematic in some way. The author feels this internally and hopefully it's without a bunch of pressure put on them. Maybe their heart has changed on issues which might be described as 'woke'.

I think they have the right to rewrite the book for any reason they like. And release another edition of it. Mary Shelley did this (for artistic reasons rather than 'problematic' ones) with Frankenstein.

Or:

Author has been dead for 70 years. Copywrite has become public domain.

People ought to be allowed to write 'woke' versions of their books if they like. However it likely has to add more than just 'wokeness' to sell. Doesn't mean for eg that a gender swapped version of Sherlock Holmes wouldn't be a good book, it just means that the new author needs to add something more to it than that and that the new author needs to be able to write well. They'll do this best if they respect the original books first.

I wouldn't like an author to decommission their original books for reasons of wokeness. I don't like that Dr Seuss' publishers did this. But it is the right of authors and publishers to decide this. After all, books go out of print all the time.

It's also their right to choose to write a new version & if they added to it then I might be interested in reading it.
*
Now the in between bit is whether the estate of a newly dead person gets to do it.

I don't think they should be allowed. It's not their book and it's not yet public domain. And so many people want the world to have a romanticised version of their relatives, especially their dead relatives. We open up the right for grandson to censor dead grandma's erotica if we let granddaughter censor dead granddad's book for not being woke enough.

I don't see anything wrong with a "revisionist" version of Sherlock Holmes----as long as the Sherlock Holmes of previous eras are not dispensed with.

If an author wants to write a "revisionist" version of his/her own work, I don't see anything wrong with that---with the caveat that (it would be nice) if the author would explain the reason for the revisions within the preface.

It would be absurd to just "stamp out" history just because it doesn't meet "woke" requirements or whatever.

One should remember, and be instructed by, the 18th century's "Bowdlerization" of Shakespeare's works. It rendered Shakespeare but a shadow of itself.

I don't think such books be rewritten. Those works should be left as they are. Reading those books gives me an appreciation of how much times have changed.

Some religious extremists would say that books with outdated views should be burned. The ironic thing is that most here would believe that those extremists books are the outdated 1s that should be re-written but those extremists believe that lots of other books are the outdated 1s including religious books that contradict their own religion & science books that teach evolution. My point is that different people & groups can have very different opinions & ideas about what is outdated. No person or group should have the authority & power to decide what is acceptable & what is not. They can write their own books about what is current & true or whatever & all books have a right to exist. People can chose to read what they want & decide for themselves.

Have any of you read The Book Thief? It seems fitting for this discussion.

How about The Perks of Being a Wallflower?

"Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight". Stephen Chbosky

"Charlotte's Web – Shockingly enough, more recently, this seemingly innocent children's book written by E.B. White was banned in Kansas in 2006 because “talking animals are blasphemous and unnatural;” passages about the spider dying were also criticized as being “inappropriate subject matter for a children's book."

Kill me now.

I saw the movie based on “The Book Thief.”

It was really good.

No, but disclaimers about the content, and a guide for parents to talk to their kids about said content would work.

I admire this quote Helen Keller said in response to the Nazis burning her books ''You may burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas those books contain have passed through millions of channels and will go on.''

The Third Reich was the furthest thing from woke.

Banning books for being written by Jews or even written by cis het white men wouldn't be ok.

Especially if 'banning' those people from being alive (mass murder) followed.