The novel’s Western values are not a universal pure flowering of Enlightenment culture

Evidence

Naipaul is a Nobel Prize–winning novelist and travel writer representative of a mindset that has internalized Western standards and mythologies and that automatically reproduces them as a shorthand way to understand other cultures. His writing thus seems to belong to an older way of seeing. Yet the tendency to universalize one viewpoint at the same time as claiming to be able to read and reproduce a range of perspectives persists, and its effects are central to this study. The value of literature lies partly in the way it structures our feelings about the world and others in it, providing imaginative access to alternative experiences. In literature, the assumption that the novel form itself and the values it is said to carry are in some way an embodiment of the pure flowering of post-Enlightenment Western culture ignores other models for the development of prose fiction and overlooks the ways that cultures inform each other through their historical proximity and interaction and how their creative genres take shape in part due to that contact. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 49

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the critical move that a novel form presumed to carry inbuilt Western values is not neutral - it can smuggle in the universalizing Orientalist gaze.
• XREF: The universalize-one-viewpoint-while-claiming-many critique connects to the double-consciousness at play in Changez’s narration in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. — connects to: Postcolonial literatures should not claim equality by emulating Western aesthetic standards. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 914