things will never be the same after this...

That is exactly what I feel about this class. Since we started digging deeper into these multicultural books and really "questioning the text", I will never be able to pick up a book again in the same way. I find myself constantly asking why things are put into certain ways, I wonder if the book is authentic and mostly I have been trying to look at things from a perspective other than my own. The idea of this is not awful, it is actually a great quality to have but it surely makes reading anything a lot more complicated.

For example, the readings for this week by Marc Aronson and Andrea Pickney both discussed eligibility for various literature awards. Before this class, I knew of some of these awards and when they were placed on books, I held those books to a higher value than others. Naive of me, yes, but it's something that many people find themselves falling into without even thinking about it. I was one of those people. Then this past week I picked up the article by Aronson in which he questions the merit of awards such at the Coretta Scott King award that "predetermines the book's validity" based on ethnic credentials. Aronson raises several good points such as having this type of prerequisite makes it so that books are "not literature in its own terms but by extraneous standards." "Who you are, which box or boxes you check on the census form, comes first. Your community, your ethnicity, comes before your talent. And as long as the prize is essentially a community honoring and encouraging its own, it is not clear how the rest of the public is meant to react." Aronson questions the validity of these awards because they are not based strictly upon literary merit but first and foremost the ethnicity of the author. Before this article I had never thought about this point of view. To me, these awards were honoring works written by specific cultural heritages yet Aronson makes a strong argument questioning the actually literary merit of these books. Are we choosing them because they are rich books or because they have a specific author?

Pickney on the other hand rebuttals Aronson’s article with several good points as well. She argues that the basis of these awards is not to select the best literary book but instead select and honor specific writers (based on their heritage/background) and the books they write. By having these awards, we are making sure to highlight those authors which sometimes get lost in the midst of things because they are from a small represented group. These awards are not trying to say they are choosing the best book based on its literary merit, instead they are choosing the best book within their specified requirements.

While both of these articles raise some great points they leave the question remaining; how do these awards influence reader’s choices? Do the requirements for these awards enhance the number of quality books on the market or do they hinder readers by putting an award, simply because they are written by a specific ethnic writer, onto a low quality book? To me these questions remained unanswered. Before this class I would have seen awards as only a positive thing, yet now I have been opened to other opinions which have brought me to see another light on this topic. So for now I remain on the fence. Knowing that this is one debate where both sides have pros and cons and I don’t think either side will pull me over anytime soon.