Literary versus Nonliterary People: Rhetorical Strategies of Derogation in the Sensitivity Reading Debate

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Sensitivity reading (SR)—the expert, ameliorative assessment of literary texts for superficial, inaccurate, or degradative depictions of oppressed groups—is a hotly contested service in the book industry, one that some hold is censorious. This article explicates how these detractors’ critiques function as informal suppression, drawing inspiration from Joanna Russ to expose key rhetorical strategies that reinforce a pernicious distinction between “literary” insidersand “nonliterary” out siders. The construction and propagation of this distinction ultimately encodes minoritized editors as “sensitive readers” who constitute a threat to the literary enterprise itself, thereby rationalizing their continued marginalization on aesthetic grounds.