Large swaths of the publishing industry have been captured by an ideological paradigm that prioritizes limitations and restrictions over quality. Instead of approaching manuscripts with a mindset that asks, “Does it have literary and intellectual merit?”—in other words, is it innovative, brilliant, daring, fresh, and beautiful?—the publishing gatekeepers, including agents, editors, and publishers, tend to pass new works through a filter of limiting rules. 

One of those rules requires that the identity of fictional characters match their authors’ identity—otherwise the author is guilty of “cultural appropriation.” Another rule mandates that stories take an approved (read progressive) stance on issues involving minorities, diversity, transgenderism, racism, guns, immigration, etc., with little room for ambiguity and irony. Most importantly, perhaps, any words, phrases, topics, or ideas that are considered “problematic” have to be removed, and “sensitivity readers” are on hand to enforce this norm. 

A recently published study by Adam Szetela, titled That Book Is Dangerous!: How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing, documents in exhaustive detail the censorious and creativity-suppressing effects when literary texts are passed through the prescriptive filter of sensitivity readers. None of the restrictions mentioned here are openly spelled out in a manual or checklist, but they have become a silent industry standard, which has shifted the focus away from the artistic merit and aesthetic value of texts toward a predominant concern with matters of theme and content.  

How We Got Here 

Things have not always been like this, and a look at the recent history of literary criticism can be instructive to understand how we ended up here. The 20th century has seen a succession of schools or movements of literary criticism, each one with its own strengths and limitations. Victorian and early-20th-century approaches to literature were often centered on the author’s life and private world of ideas. According to this method, a work of literature was assumed to be a direct expression of the mind, personality, or experiences of its author. Therefore, studying the author’s life was a reliable and telling way of unlocking the meaning of the text. The reaction to this biographical approach came in the form of New Criticism, an Anglo-American school of literary analysis that flourished between the two world wars. This method focused on the aesthetic and formal properties of literary texts, i.e. their internal order and formal artistry, to the exclusion of biographical or historical considerations. 

After WWII, a new paradigm took hold—structuralism—which modified New Critical formalism by looking for the mental, societal, and cultural patterns and motifs embedded deeply in subtexts of narratives and myths (e.g. the father-son conflict, the hero’s journey, the role of the trickster figure, etc.). Both the New Critical and structuralist approaches have in common that they treated texts as the ultimate repositories of authority and the fulcrum of meaning, with the critic serving merely as an intermediary, revealing a work’s internal consistency and thematic universality. 

The advent of Critical Theory in the early 1980s changed all that. Thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School and with French poststructuralism shifted the dominant perspective from a model that focused on aesthetic order and deep structure to one that prioritized the content and especially the content’s ideological implications. The Marxist outlook of philosophers associated with the Frankfurt School (thinkers like Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas) propagated the view that all human relations, as well as their cultural and artistic manifestations, were rooted in unequal power relations. This materialistic approach filtered down into the way literature was treated as a privileged cultural site where the drama of dominance and unequal social relations was being played out. And it dovetailed nicely with the work of French poststructuralists such as Michel Foucault and Jean François Lyotard, who argued that “discourses”—i.e. unexamined verbal conventions to talk about matters of race, colonialism, sexuality, class status, disability, etc.—were not just passive linguistic habits but rather means of actively making these very categories. 

According to this view, the discourse of Orientalism “constructs” the thing called the Orient, the discourse around homosexuality constructs what is a gay or a lesbian person, the discourse of race constructs what a black, brown or white person is, and so on. And since language socially constructs whole swaths of reality, language is also the lever by which those aspects of reality can allegedly be modified. Hence, if you can change the way people speak or write about something, then you change the very thing itself. Make certain “harmful” words disappear (or replace them with euphemisms), and the attitude linked to those words will disappear along with them. This logic, which has given us the entire politically correct lexicon, entails both verbal vigilance and self-censorship.

This paradigm acted as a catalyst for the growth of activist and prosecutorial approaches in literary and cultural studies, designed to reveal an author’s unenlightened, elitist, socially backward, patriarchal, colonialist—and occasionally also adequately progressive—views. In 1965, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur coined the term “the hermeneutics of suspicion” to describe this tendency. As programs dedicated to the study of race, class, and gender sprang up on campuses across the nation, a consensus took hold that the literary critic’s principal task was to identify oppressive ideological agendas and show how novels, short stories, plays, and poems were engaged in perpetuating harmful discourses and cementing iniquitous social relations. The spirit of this type of criticism is expressed in articles such as Chinua Achebe’s “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” and Anna Juhnke’s “Remnants of Misogyny in Paradise Lost.”

Such concerns would have been bewilderingly irrelevant to an earlier generation of formalist critics, who were beholden to a different paradigm, i.e. what structuralist critic Jonathan Culler called the “hyperprotected cooperative principle.” This concept denotes a kind of contract between reader and author, a bond of trust, where the reader approached a work of literature reverently, in the conviction that things were arranged the way they were for artistic, stylistic, poetic, and irreducibly aesthetic reasons, and the critical reader’s job was to figure out how to make sense of the seeming contradictions, tensions, and challenges. 

Sins of Omission or Commission

But under the aegis of the poststructuralist hermeneutics of suspicion, generations of undergraduate and graduate students, i.e. the future professional class of literary critics, agents, editors, and commentators, not to mention general readers, were taught that to be a discerning judge of literary works meant to be able to sniff out what identity was unfavorably represented in a given text, what insensitivities pervaded a story, or how texts socially constructed, and thus made possible the status quo around race, class, and gender. 

It hardly surprises that literary agents and editors in all echelons of the publishing industry are now willing to crucify works of literature, no matter how brilliantly written, on the basis of perceived sins of omission or commission. No wonder, too, that scores of readers—especially on Twitter and Goodreads— are loudly condemning certain “dangerous” works of literature (often without having read them) and that they seem unable to separate an author’s own moral (or immoral) stances from the characters and events contained in their fictional creations.

Literary agents and editors in all echelons of the publishing industry are now willing to crucify works of literature, no matter how brilliantly written, on the basis of perceived sins of omission or commission.

In 2023, PEN America issued a lengthy report of these limiting and censorious trends titled “Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm.” In it, we read that:

"Since 2017, these trends in online literary behavior have extended from the YA space to publishing more broadly. Three recent examples, Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Snow Forest, Cecilia Rabess’ 2023 debut novel Everything’s Fine, and Gretchen Felker-Martin’s 2022 sci-fi horror book Manhunt were all targeted by review-bombing. In all three cases, one-star reviews began pouring in before the books were published, with critics objecting to the books’ premises—a story set in Russia, a story about a Black woman who falls in love with a conservative white coworker, and a story about a virus that targets trans people, respectively. In each case, critics objected to the presumed content rather than providing insights gleaned from reading the books themselves."

Such an inquisitorial view of literary works gave rise to what Kazuo Ishiguro has called “a climate of fear” among authors and creatives. This trend has undermined academia’s and publishing’s ability to deal with the craft of literature as an artistic endeavor and a human striving for profound aesthetic experiences. 

Of course, there is nothing wrong with having a distinct critical perspective when reading and discussing literature, and no theme should be considered off-limits for analysis, but we also need to keep in mind the integrity of verbal artifacts and their superior aesthetic value. To me, the time is ripe for a new paradigm that departs from the binary model of interpretation that either prioritizes content at the expense of form, or conversely, one that only concerns itself with aesthetic matters to the exclusion of personal, socio-historical, or philosophical contexts. The academic study of literature should not be self-limiting one way or the other, but should consider all the different approaches that have historically played out in the various movements and schools across time.

In my own teaching and research practice, I have realized that every literary text is asking for a different kind of approach. Some poems scream out for a formalist treatment; some novels respond well to a biographical approach; others benefit from a structuralist analysis; and certain plays are best read through the lens of social class or race. 

Whatever the case, we should avoid the blind application of fault-finding, bias-hunting, harm-locating approaches across the spectrum of literary texts and genres. Likewise, turning all serious readers—let alone literary agents and publishers—into ombudsmen for certain disenfranchised or victimized groups, and using a scolding tone to hold authors and books accountable for all kinds of sins, whether real or imagined, is extremely counterproductive. That’s because the best fiction often challenges our preconceptions, opens our world to new ideas and perspectives, and doesn’t chime with our moral certainties. Let us learn to embrace uncertainty, difference, and real wonder by truly listening to the works of literature we deal with, and respecting their artistic integrity while not closing our eyes to their implied messages. Most importantly, we must not crush these works of art under the weight of our own limited, righteous, and presentist agendas.

Some years ago, after realizing what a regressive, self-limiting state the world of publishing had become, I decided to do something about it: After retiring from my faculty position, I founded a publishing house by the name of Heresy Press—nomen est omen! Since its inception in 2023, Heresy Press has issued boundary-pushing, provocative works of fiction chosen primarily for their literary and intellectual merit. We’ve recently branched out into nonfiction, and the first book in that category, The War On Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech—And Why They Fail by Greg Lukianoff and Nadine Strossen, makes an eloquent case against speech limitations and censorship.

Heresy Press’ second nonfiction project, forthcoming later this year in partnership with Heterodox Academy, is a book titled Viewpoint Diversity: What It Is, Why We Need It, and How To Get It. That volume—the first on its subject—offers discerning readers a wealth of diverse opinions and practical guidance on how to leverage and respect the critically important and yet often misunderstood concept of viewpoint diversity. In both intention and execution, this project is an object lesson in how to counter the self-limiting tunnel vision of viewpoint homogeneity and to embrace instead real diversity of ideas and constructive dialogue.