So I saw a headline about how we should read books that offend us, and I thought “wow that content is almost certainly going to annoy me, I should not click it.” Reader, I clicked it. The author, Brian Morton, and I agree on a lot, including the idea that books may contain offensive stuff (the example he uses is Edith Wharton’s anti-Semitism) at the same time they also contain beautiful writing and paradigm-shifting insight. We agree that the morality Overton window is constantly changing, and what seems okay in one social context can seem horrifyingly immoral in another social…
Leave a CommentTag: Edith Wharton
We welcome back special guest star Ashley to talk about authors we’d promote or demote from the Canon of Great Literature! Our book this week is Edith Wharton’s unfinished novel The Buccaneers, which is about rich American girls going to England to marry nobility, and Whiskey Jenny accordingly provided a game about the peerage to go along with! You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 30 An important note: Whiskey Jenny at one point mentions Roland Barthes’s book Camera Obscura, but she meant…
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