The global novel both exposes and risks reproducing globalization’s assumptions

Evidence

In his essay “Is Nothing Sacred?,” written in the early years of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa against him, Salman Rushdie promotes once more the familiar idea that the novel is almost by definition a bastion of freedom against the narrow exclusivism of religion: “Whereas religion seeks to privilege one language above all others, one text above all others, one set of values above all others, the novel has always been about the way in which different languages, values and narratives quarrel.” This is a popular line of argument among writers, generally used to bolster claims about the novel form as a conduit for empathy. Ahdaf Soueif, for instance, sees the writer’s duty as being to create characters who stimulate empathy in readers—“such powerful empathy that they want to reach through the print to help or comfort them.… A work of fiction lives by empathy—the extending of myself into another’s, the willingness to imagine myself in someone else’s shoes.” These thoughts are a handy reminder of the basic tasks of fiction, but we need also to distinguish active transcultural empathy from a lazily universalizing notion of shared human experience that can encourage us to respond only to that which is already familiar. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 32 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
• XREF: connects to: The novel shows globalization’s inevitability narrated through evolutionary metaphor; World literature trades unequally between a dominant center and periphery; The novel-as-empathy claim risks universalizing rather than respecting cultural particularity — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 32 (+1 more)

Related

• The novel-as-empathy claim risks universalizing rather than respecting cultural particularity (similarity 0.91)
• Novel-empathy rhetoric can flatter Western readers while denigrating another culture (similarity 0.83)
• Estrangement from one’s own culture enables genuine judgment of it and others (similarity 0.82)
• The global novel can critique globalization while risking reproducing its assumptions (similarity 0.81)
• Unsourced universalizing verbs transform people into objects of a privileged observer. (similarity 0.80)
• Novels embedded in the global market can only signal, not escape, their own complicity. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Contesting Islamophobia in the novels can inadvertently endorse neoliberal individualism over communal identity #complicates (0.60)
• The novel-as-empathy claim risks universalizing rather than respecting cultural particularity #complicates (0.55) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 32