Critical reading methods can contest rather than reproduce dominant power

Evidence

Do our readings really always confirm power? Are we all such passive consumers, seeking a quiet life when we read? By any standards, this is an extraordinarily sweeping description of the complex processes of reading and critical engagement. Asad here overlooks a century or more of Marxist criticism, to say nothing of other political schools such as feminism, race studies, and queer theory, which continue to challenge discourses of power in the interpretations they offer. Techniques of reading against the grain, along with that relative autonomy of literary texts that I have been keen to foreground in this study, reveal this argument as cripplingly limited. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 495

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: An author produced by power need not obey power’s logic in their work