The liberal novel can only gesture obliquely at tensions it cannot resolve.

Evidence

How does the supposedly capacious and liberal novel accommodate values that are antithetical to its own assumptions? This study suggests that although it is impossible to overcome inherent boundaries within the form and the outlook it encourages—which are in any case generically constitutive—it is possible to gesture to the existence of these tensions, albeit often obliquely and through a dramatized bracketing of the commonplaces by which literary criticism and reception seek to tame and domesticate difference. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 516

Categorization

• XREF: This contradicts the standard liberal-humanist defense of the novel as inherently empathetic — the reader is testing this against Hamid and Naqvi’s narrative strategies as contest-vs-reinforce evidence.
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘dramatized bracketing’ as the formal tool by which novels flag their own limits on accommodating Islamic political identity.
• SEED: Angle: the novel that openly dramatizes its own inability to fully accommodate Islamist values is more honest — and more contesting of Islamophobia — than the novel that pretends to embrace all difference.