The same literary form can either contest or reinforce hegemonic narratives

Evidence

However, regarding the debate about culture and difference that ignited again after 9/11, it is important to bear in mind that questions of form can be charged with entirely different political meaning. For example, instead of becoming a bridgehead for contestatory narratives, polyphony in Reading Lolita in Tehran by the Iranian émigré author Azar Nafisi is advocated as a liberal humanist clincher to shut down dissenting viewpoints and readings at the same time as it is promoted as a guarantee of the tolerance, “democracy,” and thereby superiority of the Western literary canon. Thus, the first major lesson that can be drawn from studying narrative and power is that there is no single model of the relationship between form and politics. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 18

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the key analytic premise: form (e.g., polyphony) carries no fixed politics and must be judged in context.
• XREF: Directly relevant to reader’s hinge work: polyphony-as-liberal-clincher is a warning against assuming free indirect speech in Hamid or Naqvi automatically contests Islamophobia. — connects to: Literary works generate the very situations they also react against — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1786; Narrative form itself, not author intent, generates ideological content. — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1879; Activist advocacy and one’s literary figures can be at odds without contradiction. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1310 (+1 more)
• SEED: Possible essay angle: the moment a ‘contestatory’ narrative device flips into a liberal humanist shut-down of dissent — testable against Nafisi, Hamid, Naqvi side by side.