Anxiety and Irresponsibility: What Is to Be Done About Literary Moralism?
In her recent essay “Anxiety and Responsibility: What Stories Can Come From Our Current Moment,” Clare Pollard almost wholly encapsulates a prevailing literary ethos: that the primary function of social novels is social change, that social change lends fiction real-world utility, that its real-world utility makes fiction a craft, that this craft requires labor, and…