Crude propagandism in misery memoirs undercuts their own truth-claims

Evidence

Although I think this may be one effect of these books, it could be argued that their very qualities of rawness and at times crude propagandism actually distract from their endeavor to create fully convincing fictive simulations from which relevant lessons can be drawn for our “real world.” This distraction has to do with the matter of mimesis, the way the books make their truth claims, how they manage their reality effects. Exploring this issue also requires that we consider questions of genre because it, too, conditions how we receive and interpret literary texts. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 213

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces mimesis and ‘reality effects’ as analytic terms for how these books manage truth claims—a transferable critical tool.
• XREF: The ‘reality effects’ concept (via Barthes) is a sharp lens for reading Home Boy’s and Reluctant Fundamentalist’s realism against the misery memoir’s crude propagandism. — connects to: Rushdie’s self-ironizing ambiguity marks ironic distance from his own claims