"The Mound of His Back": The Profession of Literature and the Fear of the Mob

Abstract

Recent novels respond to the current crisis of democracy by invoking literary fiction as a means to cultivate empathy and as a model for more inclusive forms of community. But such novels also often defend the mission of literature by casting service workers and popular voters as foils and by defining those figures as ignorant and irrational. Reflecting the educational cleavage that shapes both literary culture and the current political environment, such defenses of literature point toward the class limitations of contemporary liberalism and, in this respect, are not good models of democracy.This is a sentence that expresses a judgment about the characters it depicts, and the judgment is clear: they are poor, ugly, and stupid.