Any decent literary critic would know that art should not be didactic.

 Any decent literary critic would know that art should not be didactic. “This frenzy for censure, moralizing, and a seemingly endless expansion of the definition of harm.”

Otis Houston: “Literature used to be … a place to question taboos, and seek naked insights into humanity. …

Critics, writers and publishers are today enforcing a new vision that treats books less as a vehicle for artistic expression … a series of moral pronouncements. … sin of writing about marginalized characters without belonging to the same identity group. …

[They say] Jeanine Cummins, a white American woman with some Puerto Rican background, had no business writing about a culture and identity group to which she didn’t belong. … sensitivity to people writing about heritages that are not their own because, at its worst, this practice perpetuates the evils of colonization, stealing the stories of oppressed people for the profit of the dominant.”(5) …

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, who is chair of English at the University of Southern California, has pressed fellow authors to repurpose their writing into progressive advocacy.(6) The only respectable goal of contemporary literature, he suggested in a New York Times essay last December, is to bring change through “the kind of critical and political work that unsettles whiteness(1) and reveals the legacies of colonialism.” Poetry and fiction that fail to advance politics (specifically, his politics) descend from a legacy of whiteness, conquest and genocide, he said …

Publishers seek to protect themselves by employing “sensitivity readers,” who scour unpublished fiction for offensive themes, characterizations or language. … moral, rather than artistic, gatekeeping(3) …

Two thousand years before the advent of mass print publishing, Socrates was sentenced to drink poison for having polluted the minds of the YA community of Athens. From the mid-16th century until 1966, the Catholic Church maintained its Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of prohibited books. Over the past century, the establishment used anti-obscenity laws to ban Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. …

New, though, is the trend of policing books for social goodness from within the left-leaning literary community …

This new literary moralism isn’t only scrutinizing contemporary writing for evidence of sin; it’s looking to the past as well. #DisruptTexts, a group dedicated to helping teachers “challenge the traditional canon,” talks of “problematic depictions” in Shakespeare(4), and complains of The Great Gatsby being defined by the white male gaze(2). …

It diminishes the prospects of the reader too, restricting the scope of books to narrow conceptions of power and privilege. …

Art forces us to see with complexity. In return, we must accept that no easy solution awaits. Profound writing is never just an answer. …

This frenzy for censure, moralizing, and a seemingly endless expansion of the definition of harm …”

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[Reduces aesthetic writing to mere expository prose, “talking politics.”]

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(1) Liberalism holds that it is just as wrong to say there is something wrong with being white as saying there is something wrong with being black. It violates the principle of equality.

(2) Liberalism holds that it is just as wrong to say there is something wrong with being male as saying there is something wrong with being female. It violates the principle of equality.

(3) The purpose of art is to be good art. (Is that so hard?)

(4) Chairman emeritus of the Cal Lit Department Frederick C. Crews spoke of moral critics “perpetually scandalized by the past.”

(5) Isn’t our mainstream religion’s heavy reliance on the Tanakh, the Book of the Israelites, disrespectfully called the Old Testament by gentiles, “cultural appropriation” by this logic?

(6) Liberalism, in our very own Declaration of Independence, holds that one of The Rights of Man is “the pursuit of happiness.” In this context, it means that writers get to write about whatever they want to write about.

[www . persuasion . community/p/beware-of-books]