Literary texts retain enough autonomy to resist the power structures reproducing them
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
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: This is the crux for the reader’s thesis: fiction’s ‘relative autonomy’ is the mechanism by which a novel can contest rather than merely illustrate Islamophobia. Nails down ‘autonomy’ as the load-bearing term.
Related
- Critical reading methods can contest rather than reproduce dominant power (similarity 0.92)
- Political criticism and reading against the grain refute Asad’s claim that readings confirm power (similarity 0.87)
- Asad holds that reading imaginative texts inevitably reproduces existing power structures (similarity 0.84)
- Novels contesting Islamophobia are enmeshed in the very market that trades on it (similarity 0.81)
- Literary fiction’s world-making power makes it vital for combating Islamophobia (similarity 0.81)
- Literary form can reproduce or contest power’s value judgments (similarity 0.80)
- Literature’s demand for depth enables more measured appreciation of others. (similarity 0.80)
- Literature, drama, art, and cinema sustain a habitus about Islam built on Muslim monsters (similarity 0.80)
- Literature’s talismanic power in Islamophobia debates depends on its interpretive openness (similarity 0.80)
- Literature embedded in global markets may be unable to contest capitalism’s Islamophobia (similarity 0.79)
- Genre form refracts rather than directly reflects political ideology (similarity 0.79)
- Islamophobia-resisting fiction can work head-on or by unsettling readerly expectations (similarity 0.79)
- Capital, not religious ideology, drives Islamophobia’s political deployment. (similarity 0.79)
- Reading transforms both its object and the reader when practiced critically (similarity 0.79)
- Formal devices can both advance and expose texts’ Islamophobic agendas (similarity 0.79)