Political Texts, Polemical Texts

Track the points of agreement and disagreement in the following statements. The quotes from literary writers provided below are relevant to the question: "Should the literary text make political arguments?"  Add your own answer to the following list. 

• Reginald McKnight: “I try very hard not to make any political statements. […] I don’t expect my work to have any necessary political or aesthetic effect.”

 

• Stephen Dobyns: “We have seen antiwar poems of this nature, radical feminist, black, gay, and Marxist poems. Every belief has its partisan art, which either speaks to those already convinced of its truth or bullies those who aren’t. The difficulty is that while extreme partisanship is easy to spot, its subtle forms can be insidious. Any kind of bias is a form of partisanship and if it enters the work, it then weakens it unless the work’s avowed purpose is to be propagandistic or didactic or to curry favor.” 

 

• Jonathan Skinner: “For literature to have value, it must engage with controversial political or social issues.” Literature must be “alive to what is most at stake in the present moment.”

 

• Joanna Russ: “I tried to figure out how to do propaganda in fiction.”

 

• Nadine Gordimer: “[O]urs is a period when few can claim the absolute value of a writer without reference to a context of responsibilities. […] The writer’s “essential gesture as a social being is to take risks that the critics and readers do not know that they themselves would take.”

 

• Trinh T. Minh-Ha: “Neither entirely personal nor purely historical, a mode of writing is in itself a function. An act of historical solidarity, it denotes, in addition to the writer’s personal standpoint and intention, a relationship between creation and society. Dealing exclusively with either one of these two aspects, therefore, proves vain as an approach. So does the preaching of revolution through a writing more concerned with imposing than raising consciousness…”

  

• Janet Burroway:  "The writer, of course, may be powerfully impelled to impose a limited version of the world as it ought to be, and even to tie that vision to a political stance, wishing not only to persuade and convince but also to propagandize. But because the emotional force of literary persuasion is in the realization of the particular, the writer is doomed to fail. The greater the work, the more it refers us to some permanent human impulse rather than an easy slogan or a given institutional embodiment of the impulse. Fine writing expands our scope by continually presenting a new way of seeing, a further possibility of emotional identification; it flatly refuses to become a law."

 

• Amiri Baraka: In a poem, “the first thing you look for is the stance.” 

 

• Steve Westbook: “It is—and has been throughout history—difficult to find a writer without a purpose for their writing. Production is driven by purpose.... [W]e…find it extremely difficult to think of writers who have not acted to change culture or alter discourse in some meaningful way, however minor or major.”

 

• Anton Chekhov (from a letter written to his editor): “[Y]ou are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.”

 

• Edwidge Danticat: “Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk her or her life to read them.” 

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