In Response to Darkness Too Visible

Response to Darkness Too Visible

Lars Asmundsson 803

In Darkness Too Visible, author Megan Cox Gurdon talks about young adult literature not being fit for teens. She believes that books meant for teens are  too dark, hence the title “Darkness Too Visible”. She also notes the drastic spike in obscenity over the past few decades in the genre. Throughout the article, she tries to convince readers that young adult literature is detrimental to the minds of teen readers.
 
Gurdon uses imagery to paint a horrid picture of young adult books in the minds of readers. For example, she uses forceful language like “ bulldoze coarseness or misery into their childrens lives” to close her article. Also, she uses voice to connect to the reader by saying “How dark is contemporary fiction for teens? Darker than when you were a child, my dear”. I think that she she successfully uses craft to enhance her argument.

 
Personally, I believe that young adults should be able to decide for themselves if the genre is appropriate for them. It isn't up to some out of touch adults to decide what teens can read and what they can’t. Earlier in history, elder people were considered wise, but certain adults these days are so conceited that they believe that they know what is best for children even though many themes that come up in YA literature are legitimate issues that many children face. These certain adults may have come from privileged families where they didn't face many serious roadblocks in their development as kids, but bad things happen, and writers of young adult literature have the guts to address these issues head on.

Lars Asmundsson

I have taken Social Studies for many years now, and if there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that history repeats itself. Apparently, iconic sci fi writer Ray Bradbury agrees. In the 1500’s and 1600’s Europeans ventured by to ship to the Americas. They took over the lands that the natives had inhabited for centuries and destroyed their culture. In the Martian Chronicles Earth is in ruins and people want off it, so they  turn to space travel to turn Mars into Earth 2.0. Earthlings leave Earth for Mars and pillage the people and eventually wipe out the great majority of the native Martians. The few remaining Martians flee into the mountains and only come in contact with humans on rare occasion. I think Ray Bradbury is basing the Martian Chronicles off the events that conspired when the european pilgrims settled in America and nearly wiped them out eventually.

The reason Ray Bradbury is writing a story about the interactions between earth and the native martians is because he wrote this book slightly before the space race possibly as a cautionary tale. He wrote this book a couple years before the period of 1955-72 where the U.S and the (then) U.S.S.R tried to be the first to get a rocket into space. He wrote it in 1950 but the book took place in the late 1990’s as a cautionary tale about how settling and conquering foreign lands. I think was a smart approach to the promise of space travel seeing how many people believe in space travel and humans have a knack for destroying other living things.

In conclusion, Ray Bradbury is a literary genius, who not only wrote a fantastic story but also made a compelling argument about the dangers of space travel. I agree with Bradbury when it comes to the promise of future travel to faraway planets and think we should take the explorations very cautiously. I think what people can take away from this book is that many times people get swept up in the promise of exploration that they don’t realize how it can destroy native civilizations. It has happened many a time in history that one or more countries explore and claim a new land peacefully, but, without intending to, conquer all of the native inhabitants in and around the land and, as I said, history has a way of repeating itself.