Novels can undercut their own ideological message through meta-literary self-exposure

Evidence

Nafisi’s and Hosseini’s novels construct rigid binary distinctions between American freedom and the suffering of those in Muslim countries. However, it is in their mutual interest in the slippery processes of reading and writing—Nafisi’s characters read from the canon of great Western literature, Hosseini’s protagonist is a writer—that both texts expose the expedient and questionable nature of their judgments. The truth claims of these two exhibits in the court of world opinion are thus exposed as ideologically sealed but at the same time never watertight. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 67

Categorization

• XREF: Gives the reader a specific tool: looking for meta-literary self-exposure in Home Boy and The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a sign the text contests rather than merely reinforces. — connects to: A literary lineage of self-as-performance predates postmodern performativity theory — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 645; Seemingly realistic novels like Ragtime are secretly nonrepresentational holograms of ideologemes — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 90; A novel can expose stereotypes yet trap its own character within them (+5 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: A literary lineage of self-as-performance predates postmodern performativity theory — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 645; Seemingly realistic novels like Ragtime are secretly nonrepresentational holograms of ideologemes — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 90; A novel can expose stereotypes yet trap its own character within them (+5 more)