Amother thing I hate is the idea that if a work of literature narrates the experiences of a victimized group, it cannot possibly be of a low artistic quality.
There are crowds of writers who do veritable torture porn of pathetic literary quality on the subject of Spain’s Civil War Republicans. The crap they churn out is commercially successful because everybody loves a good tear-jerker but I’m tired of the idea that any criticism of this swill means you sympathize with fascists.
There has to be a name for this phenomenon – automatic victimization of certain identity groups, the total privileging of those victimized experiences over everything else and, finally, defining your own tribal identity through unquestioning acceptance of this dynamic as the only valid description of reality.
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Absolutely. This is so widespread that it deserves a name.
The funny thing is that the Republican suffering happened decades ago. But people who weren’t even alive back then burn with such righteous indignation that you’d think they personally lost the war in 1939.
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The scapegoat’s pedestal? The sin eater’s dialectic?
I think it’s an old and rather cyclical thing.
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I’d be interested in knowing what you think about the Rigoberta Menchu controversy and the debate over the accuracy of her testimonial text…
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Testimonial literature is one of my accidental research interests. 🙂 In Spain, writers decided to stop pursuing “the truth” and very openly and deliberately mix verifiable facts and fiction in their testimonial art (novels and documentary texts and films). This is a brilliant decision, in my view, because it allows to obviate the whole fruitless debate on what is subjective as opposed to the objective. Rigoberta Menchu has at least taught everybody a lesson that the testimonial genre becomes a total joke once we begin to treat it with graveyard solemnity.
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Amother thing I hate is the idea that if a work of literature narrates the experiences of a victimized group, it cannot possibly be of a low artistic quality.
Politically correct literary “criticism”?
I think that’s broadly what’s wrong with political correctness — it’s the notion that there are “sacred cow” topics that are beyond reproach, beyond discussion, and beyond criticism.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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