Claimed literary universality masks class privilege in liberal humanist criticism

Evidence

In this fraught atmosphere, Nafisi’s restatement of the Great Tradition is anything but neutral. Working defiantly against the historicizing schools of criticism that have emerged in literary studies in the past half-century or more, the text declares that the great novels transcend their own time and place and that their characters—and by implication we, the readers—achieve “development and maturity” by successfully negotiating life’s challenges (223). The royal “We” of liberal humanist criticism is resuscitated to inform us that the “beauty and perfection” of the Western canon as well as appropriate form enable such works to rise above the ugliness and shabbiness that sometimes constitute their subject matter, satisfying “the instinctive desire for beauty” (38, 47, 49). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 233

Categorization

• XREF: Sharp analytical tool for reading Nafisi’s pedagogy and comparing it to how Hamid and Naqvi handle class in their novels. — connects to: Formalist literary criticism fetishizes form and erases real-world activism — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 88
• SEED: The claim that ‘universality is a smokescreen for privilege’ gives a critical test for distinguishing contesting from reinforcing Islamophobia in fiction.