so? the point still stands, people who want to be informed on things like this will be informed. how else would you suggest to disseminate this information meanningfully on pagebound? additionally, pagebound might be the better platform to do this on, because it doens't run on algorhythms, so making this list doesn't drive up engagement in a way that the list won't be attached to the engagement

I was sure I added her, but it must have slipped

I will never forget the moment in university that my university prof revealed herself as a Jane Austen hater and then went on to explain how much colonialism is quietly baked into Austen's works, i.e. Edward Saïd's critique that the Bertram family wealth in Mansfield Park comes from Caribbean slave holdings without discussion or condemnation. (There are counterarguments that claim Austen wrote Mansfield Park as a secretly abolitionist text, but I don't think these arguments hold much water.) Even still, this is rarely discussed in Austen fan circles and she's often held up as a feminist champion without any acknowledgment of the ways she was imperfect.

I love Austen's books and will never be a hater myself; however, it was the first time I was challenged to rethink my blind love for beloved classics and actually think harder about what goes unsaid about writers from earlier times. We can make any number of arguments that these authors were simply "of their time", forgetting that there were plenty of loud abolitionists in the Regency period too.

So this list might include Austen under the "problematic" umbrella for those reasons. Or we could make personal judgment calls based on content we're comfortable with, commit to "eating the fish and spitting out the bones" and in general be mindful of questionable content, and trust the judgment of other adults with their own reading habits.

100%!

I generally agree but would like to gently push back on the popular (and in my mind, entirely inappropriate) phrase of "separating art from artist." Even if this is a battle that I am losing in terms of the term's popular usage, haha.

Strictly speaking, "Death of the Author", separation of art and artist, as an essay and conceptual tool was never about an author being racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or otherwise morally suspect and audiences deciding individually to ignore said moral problems and enjoy the work anyway. (As it is used today when people say "the author is dead/I'm killing the author.")

Barthes' Death of the Author is a critical theory applied to interpreting a work. I.e., do we need to comb through an author's biography for "clues" as to what something meant to the author, using the author's biography or intentions as evidence in the work? ("Word of God", even, in fandom terms?) Or do we view author and work as separate things and judge a work entirely on its own content, merits, or lack thereof? This was against the common critical approach of the time, where an author's history, biography, supposed intentions, and personal life details were the first thing a critic would turn to as a lens in which to interpret the work. Barthes argues that individuals interpreting the work interpret the work for themselves, and that the author's biography is irrelevant. So really, nothing like people use the term nowadays to justify reading problematic work.

I think there's a secret third way that works better. We don't need to ignore an author's existence, or pretend Harry Potter was written by Daniel Radcliffe (frankly a juvenile and annoying thing to do when Rowling is doing real harm.) Instead, we can acknowledge that the author is real, is a moral agent, is doing harm, and then hold /ourselves/ and our communities responsible for moral choices regarding giving her money and attention or not. That choice will probably vary for people because moral codes vary. I'm in the "don't give Rowling any air or attention at all" camp, but for someone else they might still think it's fine to only purchase Rowling books secondhand. I don't agree with them but it's not the biggest issue we're facing so I probably won't argue with them unless we're friends and there's a healthy opportunity.

okay this post is long enough already but generally speaking, whether or not the author is "dead" to you (metaphorically) isn't a framing for individual consumers, it's a criticism-related theory. I think we can all do better than ignore harms, but at the end of the day every reader will make moral judgment calls for themselves.

in line with the overuse of the word problematic, i feel like as a whole we probably shouldn't be using the weird censors of the words racist/racism, homophobia, predator, pedophile, kill, rape, death, etc. i know it's used in other social media to escape censors, but in order to address some of these things head on, we need to be able to face the gravity of these these situations and the words themselves.