Political criticism and reading against the grain refute Asad’s claim that readings confirm power
Evidence
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: Morey’s ‘relative autonomy of literary texts’ is the theoretical basis for reading Hamid and Naqvi against the Islamophobic grain.
Related
- Critical reading methods can contest rather than reproduce dominant power (similarity 0.88)
- Literary texts retain enough autonomy to resist the power structures reproducing them (similarity 0.87)
- Asad’s critique resembles the reductive content-readings he targets (similarity 0.83)
- Asad holds that reading imaginative texts inevitably reproduces existing power structures (similarity 0.82)
- Reading transforms both its object and the reader when practiced critically (similarity 0.80)
- Islamophobic discourse falsely insists the Quran demands literalist reading while the Bible permits critique. (similarity 0.79)