Category: literature

Trigger warnings said to harm college students, but evidence is thin

July 30, 2018 • 9:00 am

“Trigger warnings” are of course cautionary statements given out, usually by college professors, before they present disturbing material to students. The intent is to prevent those who might have been traumatized by that subject or a related one (usually people with PTSD: post-traumatic stress disorder) from being re-traumatized.

My view of such warnings is that material that might be disturbing to everyone should be preceded by a caution (e.g., an ISIS beheading video, other gory stuff or crimes like rape), and that the professor should announce to the class at the beginning of the semester that if anyone has trigger issues, they should come to see the professor and get a list of course material that they might find offensive. But I also think that students should still be responsible for mastering “triggering” material presented in class, that students with trigger issues should be seeing a therapist, and that, in the long run, trigger warnings aren’t helpful in curing the individual of their phobias (psychologists think that one must be exposed to material to get over being triggered by it).

Further, trigger warnings might serve to keep the traumatized student in a status of perpetual victimhood. Finally, the list of stuff that has been deemed potentially triggering is so long that it’s impossible to give warnings in advance about every possible cause of anxiety. Here, for instance, is a list from a sympathetic intersectional website:

One simply can’t warn people about all that stuff in advance!

A new paper, which has been given publicity by lots of right-wing websites, piqued my interest, as it purported to show, according to those sites, that trigger warnings don’t work. Unfortunately, it shows nothing of the sort—only that trigger warnings can temporarily increase one’s sense of vulnerability in non-traumatized people exposed to disturbing prose.

Here’s the paper (click on screenshot to get to article, free pdf is here, and the reference is below). The paper is by Benjamin Bellett, Payton Jones, and Richard McNally, all at Harvard University’s Department of Psychology, and it’s in a reputable journal: Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry.

The title is cute, but what did the researchers do? They exposed 270 people recruited on the internet to prose passages considered either neutral, mildly distressing, or markedly distressing. These weren’t mostly college students, as the median age of subjects was 37 (see paper for other characteristics). Here’s what the authors say about the passages:

To simulate an academic setting, we chose passages from world literature that commonly appear in high school or college courses. Each passage was standardized in word length, and passage exposures were set to a minimum of 20 s before participants were allowed to continue to the next screen. Transparent attention checks based on the passages’ content assessed whether participants were attentively reading the passages (see supplementary materials S2 for an example of a content check question). We used three types of passages. Neutral passages were devoid of disturbing content (e.g. a character description from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick). Mildly distressing passages concerned themes of violence, injury, or death, but lacked graphic details (e.g. a description of a battle from James Bradley’s Flags of Our Fathers). Markedly distressing passages contained graphic descriptions of violence, injury, or death (e.g. the murder scene from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment). See supplementary materials (S1) for a sample passage from each category.

Subjects with PTSD or who said they had trauma issues were excluded from the study. The authors also surveyed the subjects’ demographics (sex, race, ethnicity, political stance etc.) and attitudes, like whether they believed in advance that words could cause harm and whether they thought trigger warnings should be used (80% said yes in advance). Participants were also asked if they had any history of psychiatric disorders.

They then exposed the subjects to three mildly distressing passages to get a baseline anxiety level. After that, they read ten passages in random order: five were markedly distressing and five were neutral. Half the subjects were given a trigger warning before reading the distressing passages (“The passage you are about to read contains disturbing content and may trigger an anxiety response, especially in those who have a history of trauma”) and half were not. The subjects were then assessed for various psychological variables, and multiple regression analyses were use to tease out the effects of single factors.

Here are the most important results:

  • Students who got trigger warnings saw themselves as “more vulnerable to suffering persistent negative emotional effects in the event of experiencing trauma”. That is, they say themselves as having become more easily traumatized. But this effect was small: the increase in level of vulnerability was only 5.2% and the probability that this was true under the null hypothesis of no effect was less than 0.05 but not much lower. That’s not considered a very significant effect, nor is it a large one.

 

  • More students who got trigger warnings believed afterwards that “trauma survivors would suffer persistent emotional effects” than did the controls who didn’t get warnings. But again this effect was small (5.4% increase in strength of that belief), and p<0.05, again not a hugely significant result. They also didn’t correct statistically for multiple comparisons, which would probably make these effects nonsignificant.

These two results are the basis of media reports that trigger warnings were harmful, but of course you can see the problems: not college students, self-report, small and likely nonsignificant effects. Hardly the stuff of headlines. Here are a couple other results:

  • Participants who believed in advance that words can cause harm had a significantly higher increase in anxiety from receiving trigger warnings than the un-warned controls. Again the effect is barely significant (p , 0.05), although the result makes sense.

 

  • Factors that made people who got trigger warnings even more likely to see themselves as more vulnerable included being a woman, a member of a racial minority, a liberal, a younger person, and, especially strongly, one with a psychiatric diagnosis that did not include PTSD. These all conform to our expectations or to previous results; the psychiatric diagnosis effect was especially significant (p < 0.001, but not significant for the second test of assessing the vulnerability of other people).

This study, I think, says very little about whether trigger warnings work, for those warnings are used to prevent people with PTSD or diagnosed trauma from being re-traumatized without warning. Those kind of subjects weren’t used in this study. Further, the effects were small, so they don’t even convince me that “trigger warnings don’t work and can even be harmful”. To be fair, the authors list a number of problems with the study at the end of their paper, including the fact that they used reading passages and not visual images or representations. All they can really conclude is that “Trigger warnings do not appear to be conducive to resilience as measured by any of our metrics. . . and may present nuanced threats to selective domains of psychological resilience.”

So this is a start, but what we really want to know is whether trigger warnings are helpful to traumatized individuals, and whether they can contribute to de-traumatizing them over the long run. There’s simply not much data on this issue, though the authors mention a poster—not a published paper—by Bruce (reference below) suggesting that physiological markers of anxiety in traumatized individuals were heightened after presentation of a trigger warning compared to “no warning” controls. That, too, suggests that trigger warnings might not be helpful.

So caveat lector.  While the headlines may be comforting to those who don’t like trigger warnings, the data in the paper don’t show that these warnings don’t work—at least when they’re used on traumatized individuals, as is their purpose. And headlines like the one below, from the right-wing website The College Fix, are simply misleading (click on screenshot to read the piece):

________

Bellet, B. W., P. J. Jones, and R. J. McNally. 2018. Trigger warning: Empirical evidence ahead. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, in press.

 

Poster said to show negative effects of trigger warnings on traumatized individuals:

M.J. Bruce.  2017. Predictors of trigger warning use: Avoidance or asserting accommodation needs? Poster presented at the annual meeting of the international society of traumatic stress studies, Chicago, IL (2017, November)

 

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name removed from book award for her denigration of Native Americans

June 26, 2018 • 1:15 pm

Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957) is familiar to many Americans as the author of the Little House on the Prairie series of children’s books, which became a highly-watched television show. Now I haven’t read her books or watched the show, but, at least based on the Washington Post story below, I think I can comment on the recent news about her. To wit: the Association for Library Service to Children, a part of the American Library Association, has now decided to strip Wilder’s name from a prize given to “authors or illustrators who have made significant and lasting contribution to children’s literature.”

Click on the screenshot to read the story:

You can guess why her name has been deep-sixed (the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award is now the Children’s Literature Legacy Award). It is, as often happens these days, because her name is associated with racism. In her case, it’s the anti-Native American sentiments expressed in her book. As the Post notes:

In its decision to remove Wilder’s name from the award, the library association had cited “anti-Native and anti-Black sentiments in her work” when it announced the review of Wilder’s award in February. The award, reserved for authors or illustrators who have made “significant and lasting contribution to children’s literature,” will no longer be called the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award. It’s now the Children’s Literature Legacy Award.

“This decision was made in consideration of the fact that Wilder’s legacy, as represented by her body of work, includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness,” the association said in a statement on its website.

The thing is, at least according to the Post’s article, those sentiments are ones expressed by the white settlers on the prairie who had to deal with Native Americans, and it’s not clear whether Wilders herself was a racist. Here, for example, are some of the statements quoted by the Post as being reasons for stripping Wilder’s name from the award. (Except for the comment labeled “JAC in the first post, the rest of the wording is from the paper):

  • JAC: An original complaint in 1952, which resulted in the publisher (Harper’s) changing the word “people” to settlers:

The reader pointed specifically to the book’s opening chapter, “Going West.” The 1935 tale of a pioneering family seeking unvarnished, unoccupied land opens with a character named Pa, modeled after Wilder’s own father, who tells of his desire to go “where the wild animals lived without being afraid.” Where “the land was level, and there were no trees.”

And where “there were no people. Only Indians lived there.”

  • The book includes multiple statements from characters saying, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” In 1998, an 8-year-old girl on the Upper Sioux Reservation was so disturbed after hearing her teacher read the statement aloud in class that she went home crying, leading her mother to unsuccessfully petition the school district to ban the book from its curriculum.

 

  • Elsewhere in the book, Osage tribe members are sometimes depicted as animalistic, notes the critic Philip Heldrich: In one scene, Wilder describes them as wearing a “leather thong” with “the furry skin of a small animal” hanging down in front, making “harsh sounds” and having “bold and fierce” faces with “black eyes.” Although Laura’s father espouses a more tolerant view of Native Americans, his description of a “good Indian” is one who is “no common trash.”

 

  • The character who is Laura Ingalls’s mother, Caroline Ingalls, is not subtle in her hatred of Native Americans, saying repeatedly that she doesn’t like them before she has even encountered them. As the critic Ann Romines wrote, “Indians become a code for everything that seems to threaten the settled, white life she wants for her daughters.”

 

  • In addition, in another scene, Wilder depicts white men wearing blackface for the entertainment of others — including her father.

Now if you read all of these, you’ll see that except for the statement “there were no people. . . only Indians”, which might indeed reflect Wilder’s dehumanization of Native Americans, most of the rest of the statements are sentiments expressed by the settlers, who could easily have hated and dehumanized Native Americans because they were effectively at war. This is not of course to say those sentiments were justified, but that an accurate portrayal of settlers’ lives may well have shown them to be bigots who thought of the Native Americans as savages.

I suspect that Wilder did in fact share these sentiments, based on the “no people” statement, but even she was a product of her time, and in that time most white settlers and many Americans were racists towards Indians and blacks.  What bothers me is not so much the stripping of Wilder’s name from the award, but the implicit attitude that we should disown and call out any literature in which pre-modern morality is espoused. And if you do that, then you have to stop paying homage to any author who ever expressed racist sentiments or made statements that hurt the feelings of any modern Americans. There goes Mark Twain, Thomas Wolfe, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, Walt Whitman. . . . the list goes on forever. The fact is that just a century ago, virtually all white Americans were racists, and most men misogynists. We’ve moved on, as Steven Pinker would say, but we can only judge that by looking at the past. These books give us a window into that past.

And if there are these kinds of bigoted statements in books, can’t they be used as “teaching moments” rather than present children with a sanitized canon of books in which bigotry and hatred and “othering” is never mentioned? “Huckleberry Finn” has repeatedly been removed from curricula for using the word “nigger,” as has “To Kill a Mockingbird”. Those are books worth reading, and I’m absolutely sure they can be taught with sensitivity, with room for discussion about the bigotry. I haven’t read Wilder’s books, but there is something about them that has appealed to generations of children. Must we now always point out that the author and the books are racist, just to reinforce our own feelings of being virtuous?

Here’s the statement of the American Library Association, which gave this year’s renamed prize to Jacqueline Woodson, author of Brown Girl Dreaming. They repeatedly make clear, here and elsewhere, that they are not advocating censorship, and I will take their word for it. But they are still advocating a misguided judging of classic literature by the ideological-purity standards of today. Yes, we’ve moved on, and we should show our children that we have, but in the process we should remember the milieu in which those books were written.

Here’s the ALS and ALSC’s statement; note the bit I’ve put in bold. Yes, it’s not censorship, but I still have a queasy feeling that there’s a bit of hypocrisy here. After all, the name of the award was changed because the books were judged to be ideologically unacceptable.

Statement of the American Library Association and the Association for Library Service to Children:

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books have been and will continue to be deeply meaningful to many readers. Although Wilder’s work holds a significant place in the history of children’s literature and continues to be read today, ALSC has had to grapple with the inconsistency between Wilder’s legacy and its core values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness through an award that bears Wilder’s name.

“Wilder’s books are a product of her life experiences and perspective as a settler in America’s 1800s. Her works reflect dated cultural attitudes toward Indigenous people and people of color that contradict modern acceptance, celebration, and understanding of diverse communities.

“ALSC works within the context of our society as a whole, where the conversations taking place inform our work and help us articulate our core values and support of diverse populations.

“Changing the name of the award should not be viewed as an attempt to censor, limit, or deter access to Wilder’s books and materials, but rather as an effort to align the award’s title with ALSC’s core values.  This change should not be viewed as a call for readers to change their personal relationship with or feelings about Wilder’s books. Updating the award’s name should not be construed as censorship, as we are not demanding that anyone stop reading Wilder’s books, talking about them, or making them available to children. We hope adults think critically about Wilder’s books and the discussions that can take place around them.

“It also should be noted that changing the name of the ALSC award for significant and lasting contribution to children’s literature has no reflection on past winners or their achievements, and does not negate the honor they have received for making a ‘significant and lasting contribution to literature for children.’

“This decision was made after much consideration and fact-finding. It is one that we believe serves the best interests of ALSC and all of those they serve, not only now, in 2018, but also in the long-term.”

h/t: Jim

Philip Roth died

May 23, 2018 • 7:00 am

Philip Roth, one of America’s most famous living authors, is no longer living: he died yesterday in Manhattan of congestive heart failure at age 85.  From the New York Times eulogy:

Mr. Roth was the last of the great white males: the triumvirate of writers — Saul Bellow and John Updike were the others — who towered over American letters in the second half of the 20th century. Outliving both and borne aloft by an extraordinary second wind, Mr. Roth wrote more novels than either of them. In 2005 he became only the third living writer (after Bellow and Eudora Welty) to have his books enshrined in the Library of America.

To be honest, I wasn’t a big fan, though I did enjoy Goodbye, Columbus, and Portnoy’s Complaint (who can forget the liver scene?). I tried one or two of his later books, but couldn’t get into them, though I know many others who read him religiously.

The Times goes on at length about Portnoy’s Complaint, published in 1969 when I was a sophomore in college:

After the separation [from his wife Margaret Williams], Mr. Roth moved back East and began work on “Portnoy’s Complaint,” the novel for which he may be best known and which surely set a record for most masturbation scenes per page. It was a breakthrough not just for Mr. Roth but for American letters, which had never known anything like it: an extended, unhinged monologue, at once filthy and hilarious, by a neurotic young Jewish man trying to break free of his suffocating parents and tormented by a longing to have sex with gentile women, shiksas.

The book was “an experiment in verbal exuberance,” Mr. Roth said, and it deliberately broke all the rules.

The novel, published in 1969, became a best seller but received mixed reviews. Josh Greenfeld, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called it “the very novel that every American-Jewish writer has been trying to write in one guise or another since the end of World War II.” On the other hand, Irving Howe (on whom Mr. Roth later modeled the pompous, stuffy critic Milton Appel in “The Anatomy Lesson”) wrote in a lengthy takedown in 1972, “The cruelest thing anyone can do with ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ is read it twice.”

And once again the rabbis complained. Gershom Scholem, the great kabbalah scholar, declared that the book was more harmful to Jews than “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Give me a break! Seriously! It may have polluted some Jewish dinners, but that’s about it. For a young secular Jew like me, the book was an eye-opener.

 

NYT caption: “Mr. Roth at Princeton in 1964. He wrote more than 30 books, often exploring male sexuality and Jewish American life.CreditSam Falk/The New York Times”

The problem of “sensitivity readers” in publishing

May 22, 2018 • 12:00 pm

I managed to put a post together that I started before I found the sick duck, and writing this helped take my mind off its death. It may not be as fluent or coherent as usual, but so be it.

As you may recall, many publishers, especially those of young adult and children’s books, tend to use “sensitivity readers” to make sure that everything is culturally correct and positive. I have, for instance, recounted the story of Laura Moriarty, whose book American Heart was first given a starred review by Kirkus (important for sales to libraries and schools), but then the star was withdrawn because a vetter who was “an observant Muslim person of color” decided that the book was seen through a white protagonist “filter”, and projected a “white savior narrative.” Other people who hadn’t read the book also applied pressure to Kirkus.

[UPDATE: Ms. Moriarty has posted a comment below explaining the situation, which is even more bizarre than I describe above. Have a look!]

It doesn’t take a reviewing site to vet a book; books can be changed or even banned by social-media mobs, even before the book has appeared.

To avoid this, and to boost sales, publishers are employing readers who make sure books are ideologically correct, and project only positive images of minorities. This is discussed in the following Guardian article (click on screenshot).

Is there any value to such readers, given that their main job seems not to ensure that a group or culture is portrayed accurately, but rather that it’s portrayed positively? I can see only one bit of value in vetting, which I’ve bolded in the Guardian extract below.

While some sensitivity readers charge by the hour, fees start at about $250 (£180) a manuscript. Demand is clearly high: a search on Twitter finds dozens of authors over the last few days alone looking for the service. “I am in need of a black Muslim sensitivity reader ASAP,” says one writer. “I’m seeking Japanese and Japanese-American sensitivity readers,” says another.

Anna Hecker, whose young adult novel When the Beat Drops is published in May, says she first contacted sensitivity readers after two rounds of edits with her publisher. Her protagonist, Mira, is mixed-race – half Caucasian, half African-American – and Hecker is not.

She hired three sensitivity readers, who all gave feedback. Hecker did not describe race in her initial draft, something she was told was typical for white writers. As a person of colour, it was suggested that Mira would make note of white characters’ ethnicities, in the way a white character would make note of black or Latino characters. One reader queried how Mira’s white mother learned how to braid her daughter’s mixed-race hair. Another encouraged Hecker to be more creative with descriptions, saying her initial description of “light brown skin, a wide nose, and kinky dark hair” was both cliched and boring – feedback Hecker described as “fair”.

But beyond the fact that if you describe ethnicity of some characters, you should do it for others, I don’t see the point of changing words to avoid offending people. That ultimately puts all books on the same bland level, even if the words used do offend some. It is the job of an editor to edit the book, not ideologues who want all cultures portrayed positively. The fact is that some aspects of some cultures are offensive (what about the mass slaughter of prisoners by Aztecs, or the treatment of Native Americans by U.S. settlers), and of course many people in every culture are not wonderful folks.  Ultimately, the use of “sensitivity readers” produces a bland, homogeneous, and inoffensive literature in which “everyone shall have prizes” and nobody gets offended. But if literature loses the power to offend, it loses its rationale. For offense leads to thought and discussion, and many books considered “offensive” have turned out to be classics of world literature.

So, for example, I have no problem with someone republishing “Mein Kampf” or, for that matter, “Huckleberry Finn” or “To Kill a Mockingbird”—books that many schools have tried to ban. None of these would pass a sensitivity reader, and even if “Mein Kampf” isn’t suitable for young adults or children, the other two books are. Imagine how many great works of literature would be purified into valuelessness by “sensitivity readers”!

This page gives a list of books that have been banned or challenged, and it includes even great works by black writers—books like Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”, Richard Wright’s “Native Son”, and Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” Even “Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee” was challenged because its topic, the extermination of Native Americans by whites, was “controversial.” Make no mistake: “sensitivity readers” don’t just want to purge negativity about anyone in a minority group, but also want to purge controversy per se. “Sensitivity readers” are Pecksniffs, censors, and thought police.

So let us have good editors, for all authors need a good editor, but let us also forget about “sensitivity readers,” whose very job is to turn literature into pablum.

I brought up this topic with a friend who reads a lot, and was happy to see that zhe agreed with me:

As you know, I’m a complete Stalinist for free expression – I take no prisoners, people can say what they damn please; the point is to inoculate the weaklings so they’re not wounded by others’ words, not wrap them in cotton wool and pad all the corners of the world. The point isn’t to publish defensively (make sure you offend no one) and you have to rely on your own smarts to avoid the oafish. If there had been sensitivity monitors, we’d probably not have any books by Hemingway, Mailer, Trollope, Shaw, Austen (all those terrible things she says about clerics), Atwood, Twain, or Shakespeare.

h/t: BJ

Tom Wolfe died

May 15, 2018 • 11:45 am

According to many sources, including the New York Times, author Tom Wolfe has died at 88 in New York City. He had been hospitalized for an infection.

There was much of Wolfe’s prose I admired, particularly his books The Right Stuff, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.  I didn’t pay much attention to his novels, and I savaged his last book, The Kingdom of Speech (an attack on Noam Chomsky, Darwin, and evolutionary biology), in the Washington Post.

So my verdict on his work is mixed, but assessing it as a whole, there is clearly more good prose in the world than if Wolfe had never existed.

Photo: Mark Seliger

The pretense of “diverse viewpoints” in the academic study of literature

May 4, 2018 • 10:45 am

Quillette, a website of classical liberalism that eschews (and criticizes) identity politics and authoritarian Leftism, seems to be doing well, and deserves your attention. The articles aren’t clickbait, but intellectual, yet are full of stuff to make you think. Here’s one from about three weeks ago on the intellectual uniformity of literary theory. The author, Neema Parvini, is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Surrey, a Shakespeare scholar, and author of five books, including Shakespeare and New Historicism Theory (2017) and Shakespeare’s Moral Compass (publishing this year), as well as presenter of a podcast called Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory. You can read his stimulating essay by clicking on the screenshot:Parvini describes several authors who suffered demonization and even professional damage from scrutinizing left-wing thought, including Roger Scruton and especially Richard Levin, who criticized feminist treatments of Shakespeare because “they all seemed to reach similar conclusions.”

If you have any acquaintance with literary theory, gender studies, and the like, you’ll know that the disciplines are largely ideological, pushing one Leftist point of view and shutting out others. Question these viewpoints and you’re in trouble, either as student or professor.  Now this may simply reflect the hegemony of the Left in American universities, but it’s unwise to shut out alternative voices at a time when college students should be thinking for themselves and weighing conflicting ideas, not sopping up indoctrination by their professors.

Indeed, one of my friends, an English professor at a very famous university, retired early because he simply couldn’t stand the transformation of literature from an exercise in getting the most out of reading (and learning to appreciate books) into a discipline inculcating ideology and sucking the life out of literature. I thank Ceiling Cat that I went to college and studied literature when we were simply educated in how to navigate “difficult” books like Faulkner without having a veneer of ideology slapped onto our studies. If I hadn’t had that, I may have been forever put off reading literature.

What interests me most about Parvini’s essay is how beneath the supposedly diverse methods of literary analysis in universities lies, as he says, “a stifling uniformity.” Here’s how he puts it:

Many universities and colleges currently advertise literary theory courses which purport to introduce students to a range of different approaches to literary texts. On paper, it looks like as many as ten or fifteen different approaches. The labels proliferate: new historicism, cultural materialism, materialist feminism, ecofeminism, postcolonialism, deconstruction, structuralism, poststructuralism, race theory, gender theory, queer theory, postmodernism … the list might go on. This extensive list of labels seems to signal genuine range and diversity; however, in terms of their ideas, these approaches are somewhat narrower in scope and focus than one might expect. Virtually every approach listed here lays claim to be ‘radical’, which is to say politically of the left or even hard left – with roots in Marxist theory – hostile to capitalism, the Enlightenment, classical liberalism, liberal humanism, and even to the West itself. Virtually all are also committed to ‘social justice’. It must be noted that, since about 1980, these labels accurately register the genesis of literary studies as a discipline, but what they do not register is that, as they were rising, dissenting voices were systemically hounded out of the academy.

After describing some “dissenting voices” like Scruton and Levin, he shows the uniformity of literary schools like those in the second sentence above by making a list of their similarities:

Despite significant differences, all the approaches I listed above assume that:

  1. There is no universal human nature.
  2. Human beings are primarily a product of their time and place.
  3. Therefore, power, culture, ideologies, and the social institutions that promulgate them have an extraordinary capacity to shape and condition individuals.
  4. In Western societies, since these institutions have been dominated by people who were predominantly rich, straight, white, and male it has tended towards pushing the particular interests of rich straight white men to the detriment of all other groups.
  5. Furthermore, these rich straight white men have done this by acting as if their sectional interests were universal and natural – a flagrant lie.
  6. Importantly, however, few if any of these rich white straight men were consciously aware of doing this, because they were themselves caught in the matrices of power, culture, ideologies and so on.
  7. Where subordinated groups have gone along with these power structures, they have been exploited and the victims of ‘false consciousness’.
  8. Now is the time to redress this balance by exposing the ways in which old texts have promoted the sectional interests of the rich straight white men and by promoting the voices of the historically marginalised groups.

Parvini then makes a table showing that the similarities are the oppressor vs. oppressed narrative, with only the names of the parties changed among approaches:

He criticizes this hegemony because “it is not a scientific hypothesis that can be falsified or a philosophical argument that can be countered with other philosophical arguments”, but “more of a theological proposition.” That’s true, but seems besides the point, because this kind of analysis—or any form of literary analysis beyond testable statements about how a work was constructed (author’s intention, checkable facts, etc.)—can never enter the realm of empirical testability. Yes, you can point to instances in the real world of oppression, but what a book “means” is not in general a testable hypothesis.

All you can do, and what Parvini recommends, is to teach diverse and conflicting views and let the students sort it out for themselves. As he says, “universities are places to learn how to think not what to think.”

Lionel Shriver on the new censorship

February 24, 2018 • 1:00 pm

Don’t expect much today; I’m starting to take it easy on Saturday. After all, I’m retired, for crying out loud.  I will, however, call your attention to a new piece by author Lionel Shriver at Prospect Magazine, “Writers blocked: how the new call-out culture is killing fiction“.

You’ll remember Shriver from two years ago, when, at the Brisbane Literary Festival, she gave a talk defending “literary appropriation”—the fictional description of culture or characters from one culture by a writer from another (usually white). That so triggered the black Muslim female Australian author—all adjectives necessary these days—Yasmin Abdel-Magied, that she walked out on Shriver’s speech and wrote about her distress.

That helped kindle a literary debate that continues today: what right do authors have to write about people of different races/genders/sexes/ethnicities than their own? As I’ve said before, although some sensitivity has to be used here, this kind of “appropriation” is not inherently odious. After all, fiction involves putting the author and reader into another person’s shoes, and unless it’s completely autobiographical (which it’s not if it’s fiction), why should those shoes always have to be the same size and shape for the writer and her character? Think of the number of great books we wouldn’t have if, for instance, white authors had to limit themselves to writing only about white people and “white culture” (whatever that is)? I’ve named some before, and you can fill in the blanks. And nobody ever discusses whether those who are nonwhite, or gay, or Muslim, have any right to write about “others”. Are such restrictions group-specific?

But the Pecksniffs are winning, as Shriver argues in this piece. Publishing houses now have “sensitivity” readers to vet submissions for cultural purity, and remember how Laura Moriarty lost a star on Kirkus Reviews because one of their “Own Voices” editors (yes, that’s the name they give to ideological Pecksniffs) deemed her narrative too redolent of a white savior helping a Muslim? Shriver brings that up—and more.

Often when a Leftist intellectual gets attacked or sandbagged by Authoritarian Leftists, they become strong critics of that brand of Leftism. Think of Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying at Evergreen State, Nicholas Christakis at Yale, Laura Kipnis at Northwestern, Alice Dreger, also at Northwestern, and so on. After Brisbane, Shriver also became one of those critics. I’ll just give a few quotes from her piece, which is long but worth reading:

One crucial but now imperilled fictional device is that of imbuing characters with thoughts and emotions that the author may or may not share. When characters speak and think, the writer has plausible deniability. The contractual understanding with the reader—that the content of dialogue and internal reflection does not necessarily represent the author’s own perspective—facilitates putting contradictory feelings and ideas in the same work, providing it with balance and depth. Freedom from a reader’s assumption that every character is necessarily a mouthpiece for the author’s own opinions allows for the exploration of characters who don’t embrace progressive orthodoxies—who are bigots, opponents of gay marriage, advocates of more restrictive immigration, or—the horror—Tory supporters.

Yet the “it wasn’t me, it was my imaginary friend” defence has been challenged ever since Bangladeshis successfully protested against the filming of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane in their area not because of what her novel said, but because of what her characters said. [JAC: I had no idea this had happened.] At the 2016 Sewanee Writers’ Conference in Tennessee, fellow authors accused Allen Wier of a “microaggression” because three old men in a baseball park ogled a young woman in his short story.

Is “hate speech” in dialogue prosecutable? Not long ago, I’d have said of course not. Now I’m not so sure. Minnesota has just withdrawn two great American classics, both scathing examinations of southern racism—Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird—from its school syllabus because the novels’ bigoted dialogue might make students feel “humiliated and marginalised.” Readers highly motivated to find fault often embrace deliberately unsophisticated interpretations of literary texts, for it’s easy to make passages sound atrocious just by taking characters’ assertions and word choice out of context. Indeed, searching for hidden offences has become social media’s updated version of the Easter egg hunt.

and

What is the purpose of literature? To shape young people into God-fearing adults who say no to drugs? To accurately mirror reality? To act as a tool for social engineering? To make the world a better place? Certainly fiction is capable of influencing social attitudes, or trying to. But the novel is magnificently elastic. Fiction is under no obligation to reflect any particular reality, pursue social justice, or push a laudable political agenda. The purpose of any narrative form is up to the author. Yet contemporary university students are commonly encouraged to view literature exclusively through the prism of unequal power dynamics—to scrounge for evidence of racism, colonialism, imperialism, sexism, the list goes on. What a loss. What a pity. What a grim, joyless spirit in which to read.

How did we get so obsessed with virtue? A narrow version of virtue at that—one solely preoccupied with social hierarchy, when morality concerns far more than who’s being shafted and who’s on top. If all modern literature comes to toe the same goody-goody line, fiction is bound to grow timid, homogeneous, and dreary.

I don’t want to read only about nice people, and I don’t turn to novels to be morally improved. I was drawn to writing fiction in the first place because on paper I completely control my world—where I can be mischievous, subversive and perverse. Where I follow no one else’s rules but my own. Where I can make my characters do and say abominations. I have never confused sitting down at my desk with attending Sunday school. And I frankly do not understand readers who go at novels making prissy judgments of the characters and author both, and can’t just sit down to a good story.

This debate fascinates me because it brings up something we don’t often think about: what is the purpose of literature? I’m pretty sure that whatever it is, it doesn’t include ubiquitous conformity to a set of ideological standards, all meant to effect a moral purification of the reader. Yes, some children’s book do that, and that’s okay, but we’re not children.