Realist expectations keep criticism fixated on authenticity over societal meaning

Evidence

Yet the Brick Lane controversy illustrates the pitfalls of this approach, where both sides—Ali’s supporters and the protestors—expected the author to be “representative”: they simply disagreed about how well she discharged this duty. We may want to ponder the degree to which the interpretative expectations thrown up by realism in The Black Album and Brick Lane have operated to keep the texts and the critical responses to them fixated on matters of accuracy and authenticity at the expense of understanding the broader societal shift they mark. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 162

Categorization

• XREF: Directly models the critical move the reader wants: redirecting from authenticity debates to the broader societal shift the text marks — applicable to Home Boy and The Reluctant Fundamentalist. — connects to: Ethics abolishes itself when authenticity is found to depend on history — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 551
• QUESTION: The reader should ask: what ‘broader societal shifts’ do Hamid and Naqvi mark that an authenticity-focused reading would miss?