Member-only story
The Author Is Dead, Long Live the Art!
Writers should not serve their readers as a moral compass
Due to popular demand (a huge thank you to everyone who responded to my story on trigger warnings, regardless on which platform), I will now continue the conversation I started two weeks ago on the increasing oversensitivity to controversial literary works.
Let’s begin with another classroom anecdote (I currently study Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham): during a heated debate on (in)appropriate literature, someone recalled having to read about women being mistreated, raped, and murdered in every single text assigned as part of a dystopian fiction module. In the end, the female participants had refused to read those “misogynistic” works, deeming them as “anti-feminist”.
While I don’t know which texts were included in the seminar, I, too, took a module titled “Worlds to Come: Dystopian Fiction” when I studied literature in Switzerland. Looking back at the syllabus — The Time Machine, Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Handmaid’s Tale, and V for Vendetta — I can confirm that all the assigned reading featured female characters who were abused, exploited, violated, tortured, and/or murdered. At the same time, though, it has never even crossed my mind to describe these texts as “misogynistic” or “anti-feminist”.
