Lit on Trial 1: Is Literature Always Political?

“Stop making everything political” sounds reasonable until you ask what politics actually is. We define it as the everyday negotiation of power, identity, values, and belonging, then we test the claim that stories can ever be “just stories.” If a narrative has conflict, rules, heroes, villains, gender roles, class signals, or consequences, it is already making choices about what matters and who counts.

From there, we zoom out to the biggest gatekeeper of all: the canon. Who decides what becomes “great literature” in schools and culture, and what gets pushed to the margins? We talk about how canon-building reflects historical power, why the “single story” is dangerous, and how controlling a set of approved texts can limit what people think reality looks like. We also draw a parallel to religious canon-making to show how authority can shape interpretation so deeply that alternative meanings disappear from view.

Then we bring it home to reading and teaching: interpretation is a negotiation between the author’s world and our own. That is why “pure entertainment” often means “I’m comfortable with the values here,” and why backlash to representation reveals who has had the luxury of not noticing politics in the first place. If you’ve ever argued about a book, a movie, or a “woke agenda,” this conversation gives you sharper tools and a better question to ask.

Subscribe for more Lit On Trial, share this with a friend who says art should be neutral, and leave a review with your answer: when you read, are you finding meaning or bringing it?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:43

Welcome back. Today we're putting literature itself on trial. The charge that every text, whether it admits it or not, is political. The defense that sometimes a story is just a story, and we're the ones turning it into a battleground. So, Peter, I was on Facebook the other day, and what came to me was that there are all these discussions going on all the time about literature and controversial issues about literature. And the one that struck me first the other day was I was on the Dungeon Crawler Carl Facebook page, as one is periodically, just looking at the things that people are posting. And someone made a post about Matt Deniman not wanting his page to be political. And they said, listen, this isn't supposed to be about politics. Can we stop making everything about politics? And someone posted back, yeah, because you know, taking down a capitalist fascist regime isn't political at all. And other people started making all these comments. And I thought, you know, that's a whole discussion right there, this whole idea of whether literature is political. So I talked to you, and we were thinking, you know, we should do some of these segments where we talk about these issues, and we came up with this idea of lit on trial. So this is that first episode that we're doing of this kind of segment. And we are going to discuss this political issue. So I'm going to turn it over to you because I think you're going to provide us with some definition.

SPEAKER_01 2:11

Yeah, and I think that's crucial to beginning any discussion of this nature because in essence we're having a semantic argument, we're having a semantic misunderstanding. And what I mean by that is semantics is the way in which we negotiate meaning out of words, right? Right. When I say politics, it means one thing to me. When you say politics, it means something else to you. And when people say it's not political, it obviously means something else to them. So in their mind, it is it political. But we have to kind of maybe broaden our understanding of what the term means. And I think it is a very broad meaning term. So here's the definition that I pulled up. Politics is the multifaceted process by which groups make collected decisions, manage power, and distribute resources, often summarized as determining who gets what, when, and how. It spans the art of governments, public affairs, personal relationships, organizational dynamics, and your own personal political beliefs.

SPEAKER_00 3:06

So so you're telling me it's not just about being a Republican or a Democrat?

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Or any of those hot button issues that you think of when you think about it.

SPEAKER_00 3:13

Not like abortion or any of those things?

SPEAKER_01 3:15

No, it's not. It's literally negotiating, it's a constant negotiating of your understanding, really, of reality, how it is to you and how it should be, and how people ought to operate in it. And it's very personal, it's a very personal experience.

SPEAKER_00 3:29

Right.

SPEAKER_01 3:29

Now the question is: do authors take that into everything they write? Do we take that into everything we read? Do we take it into everything we do?

SPEAKER_00 3:37

Well, so I mean, do you?

SPEAKER_01 3:38

I mean I feel like I do.

SPEAKER_00 3:40

Yeah, in my life, I'm constantly negotiating where I fit in to the structure, who I am, my identity, how I relate to the people around me. That is like a daily part of my life. And I bring it into everything I read and everything I write and the way I speak and the decisions I make. So in that context, for me, yes, everything is political.

SPEAKER_01 4:03

And I agree wholeheartedly. And we're gonna talk about that. Especially, you know, obviously, as we are discussing this on our podcast, Lit on Fire, it's very clear to anyone who's listened to any of our episodes so far that we ourselves take our politics into our experience of books as well.

SPEAKER_00 4:17

Right. We have very specific political opinions.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 4:21

I don't think we're shy about that.

SPEAKER_01 4:22

No. But it's a negotiation between us and the text as well as what the author originally intended.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

Correct.

SPEAKER_01 4:27

There's his politics and then there's our politics, and they may not always be the same thing.

The Canon As A Power Structure

SPEAKER_00 4:31

So it is a negotiation between us and the author, and we need to acknowledge that there is a lot to be negotiated here and a lot to be discussed. But judging on that definition of politics and judging on what politics actually means, I think in our very highly charged society, we need to take a step back from those marginalized groupings of political ideas, and we need to come into the actual negotiation that is that political life, that is that power negotiation, et cetera. And I wanted to take a moment to discuss this whole concept of just a literary structure as political. And I think I want to talk about the canon real quick, if that's okay.

SPEAKER_01 5:12

And what do you mean by the canon?

SPEAKER_00 5:14

Okay, so let's talk about what the canon is.

SPEAKER_01 5:15

We don't have definitions, it goes off the rails.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

Right. So I'd love to ask our audience, if the audience was sitting here with me, if you know what the canon is, but just in case you don't, the canon as a literature person is that group of acceptable great texts, texts throughout time that have been chosen to represent what is literature, what is representative of our history in literature, whether it's world literature, whether it's British literature or American literature, things that represent excellence in writing, that represent the standard for literary merit, that represent what transitions we made in writing over time, and the reflection of culture at different times in our history, and the standard by which literature should be judged. So when you look back over time, you have these great texts from Shakespeare, and you go all the way back to Beowulf as the original oral tradition that was first written down, and you go to Chaucer, and you have these great poems, and you have Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein. Okay, so you've got these great works that were put into the canon, and they're the things we're all forced to learn in school, too. And not all of it is taught in school, clearly, but these selective works are picked out and they're from the canon and they're said, yay, verily, this is great literature, right? Right. Okay, how are they chosen? Politics. Politics. And in this case, we are really talking about who has the power to choose the stories. I love Ted Talks, and I love this author called Shimamanda Adichi, and she is a great modern current writer from Nigeria, and she talks about the danger of a single story, and she talks about those in power have the right to create the stories. Not just the stories that get told and the stories about themselves, but the stories about other people. So we have Heart of Darkness written about Africa. It tells a single story about white people in Africa, and it tells a single story of black people in Africa. And it is put out there and it becomes this kind of singular text. It tells a story, and it tells a story based on the colonial power of that time. So the canon itself, in how it is formed, shows the politics of history. That's why you have a bunch of males who are predominantly white. Well, pretty much that's it. White males, for like the first several hundred years of the canon, boom, white men get to tell history. That is political, people, and that is how our literature is initially formed anyway, before we even get to the individual text itself.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

And in our educational system, just the fact that we have to fight for other representative literature, that's a political decision made on the part of the teacher, made on the part of the school district, et cetera.

Biblical Canon And Controlling Narrative

SPEAKER_00 8:10

Right. And they've chosen from the canon, and then when you try to bring things in outside of the canon, there's this whole negotiation of what has literary merit and then what is offensive potentially to people, what is considered objectionable, and all of those things. Right.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

And when I think of the canon, you know, it's funny because you think of your literary canon and I think of the Bible. Okay? As similarly speaking, those who established the biblical canon did so specifically for the purpose of taking control of the narrative, taking control of the meaning and creating dogma out of it, which is dogma is essentially like politics, essentially. It's it's like it's like creating laws and a and a way of understanding and its own kind of biblical reality, okay? Without that, they had no dogma, and therefore they had a bunch of debate and negotiations with the text. Here's one example of which the canon specifically changed and created a persona that never existed prior to the canon, and that would be Satan. So the Old Testament, what we would call the Old Testament, is actually Jewish scripture. However, it's only a select group of Jewish scripture that we have chosen to include in the Bible. Taking all Jewish scripture into account, you have other books such as the infamous book of Enoch, which Jews would have taken very seriously in their own religious development as well, and everything within it. And if you go into the book of Enoch, you see the term Satan used more than often than not as a plural, because it is defined as a group of angels that God charged to go out and observe mankind to tempt them and test their faith and then report back to them. Which is why in Job you get Satan showing up in heaven, which would be weird if you thought that that was the devil, right? Right. But from the original meaning of the word, satans are plural. And in that book, Hasatan, which means thus Satan stood before the Lord, that was the representative of that group, not the devil himself. But it created a totally different interpretation because of the canon of the Bible. And I'll leave it at that. But that is just one instance of how strongly creating the canon and those in power can affect the narrative, even to the point where people will become very passionate about defending that narrative, even when that narrative is objectively false. There is no hell or devil in Jewish scriptures. They believed that death was death. After death, there was nothing. The idea of a reward or punishment system really doesn't come into play until they're influenced by Greco-Roman mythology, and it really solidifies within the dogma in the first century CE, second century CE, after Christ's death, when the Gospels were being written. But because of the canon, the power to then control the narrative and insert those concepts earlier in the Bible is so great that people have no idea that they don't have the full picture. That's an important power of politics, the ability to limit the picture to what you want people to know and receive. So those in power can solidify their influence over them.

How Even Fun Stories Signal Values

SPEAKER_00 11:03

All right. So we start there with the structure of things and the way things are chosen as a political negotiation. Okay, Liz and Peter, that is clearly outside politics influencing the way literature is chosen, but we're talking about the inside of the book, like Matt Deniman writing about a cat and a 27-year-old guy in boxer shorts killing goblins. So how is that political? Like, are we reading too much into that? What say you?

SPEAKER_01 11:36

I say that every human being is in themselves a political entity at work.

SPEAKER_00 11:40

Right.

SPEAKER_01 11:40

Negotiating with their own reality and affecting the reality around them. So simply by the fact that Matt Deniman is a person who is living in relationship to other people, to his personal beliefs, to society's norms, etc., he brings all of that into his writing. And as a political entity, everything that is created is inherently political.

SPEAKER_00 12:02

Yeah, and I would argue that are you looking at a book, does the book have gender? Does it have age? Does it have race?

SPEAKER_01 12:10

Is it a male main character versus a female main character?

SPEAKER_00 12:13

Does that it have class? Does it have any of those negotiations? Is there conflict? Is there war? Is there anything where people are having to fight to be seen?

SPEAKER_01 12:22

Or make an ethical or moral choice. How they respond to that represents in large part a person's political beliefs.

SPEAKER_00 12:29

We are negotiating our place. We are negotiating a power structure. We are negotiating what deserves to survive and what doesn't deserve to survive. We're negotiating where we belong and personhood, etc. All these things are being negotiated. That is inherently political. Now we're all going to bring our own interpretation to that. I am not Matt Dinnerman. So when I sit down and read Dungeon Crawler Carl, I feel like I am seeing his intention and I feel like I'm feeling his characters and I am connecting with his ideas and I love it. But I am inevitably bringing more of Liz into my experience. That's the whole idea behind reader response criticism, is that I'm going to bring my own personal experience and it is going to resonate with certain things in that book more than others. Whereas when Matt was writing it, there are certain things that he experienced and resonated with as he was writing that I'm not going to recognize. That is natural. So there are things that you and I might interpret in those books that Matt may not have thought of.

SPEAKER_01 13:32

Correct. But it's not just personal, however.

SPEAKER_00 13:34

No, it's not.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

Because you can see in the way the author structures their narrative, their explicit and implicit political beliefs, simply by the fact that they have to create characters who make moral choices, right? And so therefore they have to define for themselves as they write right and wrong. Right. And simply by doing that, they have sent a message about their belief system of right and wrong.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

Right. So even if it was not an intentional choice to say, I am trying to make a political statement, in writing that portion of the book, they have made it implicitly political.

SPEAKER_01 14:10

Right. And if there's a villain, that also is an example of their personal belief, right? Because as I have experienced many times, sometimes I relate to the villain.

SPEAKER_00 14:21

Right.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

You know what I mean? Sometimes I understand them more than the main character.

SPEAKER_00 14:25

Right. And this is where I really resonate as a teacher. I teach literature. And this is what gets very difficult for us as teachers. In today's world, in particular, teachers get accused often, and literature teachers are some of the most accused, of trying to indoctrinate students. Listen, folks, if I could indoctrinate students, they would no longer use cell phones. If I had that kind of power, I would come up with a way to convince them that cell phones are evil, and they would all leave their cell phones in a ditch somewhere, and we would no longer have a problem. That would be my efforts at indoctrination.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

And they would be avid readers.

SPEAKER_00 14:59

And they would be avid readers, all of them. Like I can't get them to read a book. So there is no way I can indoctrinate them. It's just not humanly possible. Let me leave that soapbox for a second. Literature teachers get this rap all the time. You're teaching this literature, you have a political agenda. No, the book is political. There are issues, there are universal ideas, universal themes of humanity, of all of these wars and these conflicts and these struggles.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

And gender roles.

SPEAKER_00 15:29

Gender roles, all of those things are in the books. My AP literature class just finished reading A Doll's House by Ibsen, and it was controversial when it came out on the stage in the 1800s, because at the end of the play, the wife leaves her husband and children, which was just shocking to the audience of that time period. And she negotiates that departure through the statement that she needs to learn who she is by herself before she could ever be a wife and mother, that she doesn't have a real marriage, that she's been treated like a doll in a doll's house this entire time. And she needs to go out and she needs to experience life for herself. And she leaves. And it was shocking. Okay. Ibsen was making a definite statement during that time period. My kids are reading it. My kids sit there and debate. Is she justified in leaving? Was she not justified? I don't put my finger on that debate, but they are negotiating with Ibsen what he has written, how he wrote it, how he justified it, what his possible intentions might have been, the cultural context, and they are analyzing the play. That is a political process. And that is a work from the canon. They read all kinds of things. They read some things that I disagree with. They are in a constant negotiation with the text. I am not indoctrinating them. They are involved in a discussion with the text.

SPEAKER_01 16:54

Right, because I would argue if the meaning is there already, then what's more likely to indoctrinate them? Exposing the meaning and starting a debate and a discussion and bringing it to the light and allowing them to engage with it mindfully, or just let it affect them. We just read and it just subconsciously influencing them, right? That would be indoctrination. Right. You know, if if we knew that every time we went to go see a movie, we were getting flashes of different images that was what we'd be outraged, right? And that'd be like reading without negotiating with the text.

SPEAKER_00 17:22

Right. But they're in there grappling with it. And for me, that's a process that has to has to take place. And some of my students are outraged by Nora's decision to leave her family. They're outraged by it, and they talk about it and they look at the things that she does along the way, and they are there in analyzing the text. And I'm not arguing with them, you know? And some students absolutely embrace her decision and they look back at the steps in the text and they justify it with evidence, and they have their own line of reasoning. And my job is to make sure they are analyzing well and they are holding a line of reasoning and they're justifying it with evidence. That's where I come in, not the negotiation they've had and the decision that they've reached. I just want to make sure they're thinking well. So that is what we're supposed to be doing with literature. So I see this political thing, and I know our atmosphere is politically charged. And the first thing we think when we hear politics is we think of Donald Trump talking on the television, and we think of or Joe Biden, we think of all the things going on in the world, we think of Congress being in a deadlock, we think of whatever it is, the next presidential election and being exposed to all the ads on YouTube and TikTok and all the things that we see all the time. That's not what we're talking about. When we talk about books being political, we're talking about the true meaning of politics. And I think we keep forgetting what that is.

Why Pure Entertainment Is A Myth

SPEAKER_01 18:49

I agree. So now, what's this argument that some things are just purely entertainment and devoid of politics? How do you feel about that? Is there anywhere we can go where we can escape politics?

SPEAKER_00 19:01

So I was really trying to think about this and go over this in my mind because clearly there are things that we read and we watch and we feel very comfortable with those things. I have this trilogy that I reread all the time and it's very comforting for me, and I can just reread it and it's just my escape, right? I think the only reason that is, is because I'm comfortable with the politics that are there. So if you find something purely entertaining, I would argue that you're simply comfortable with what the author is offering, that there is no real challenge for you there. Perhaps it is your own version of status quo, because I'm not sure you can count anything just entertaining. I'm a mom and I've watched countless cartoons in my life and countless Disney movies, and I would argue that every single Disney movie I've watched is political. I agree. I mean, every single one. I could sit here and I could go through every one with you, from Beauty and the Beast to Mulan to Moana. I could tell you all the reasons I think those are political. And none of them are simply for entertainment value. So they all have inherent lessons in them and they all have inherent political discussions. So I guess I'll say no. There's no pure entertainment. What about you?

SPEAKER_01 20:20

I would go so far as to argue that even porn is political because it because it has a lot to say about how we view women, how women are treated, how young they should look to be sexually attractive to us, and the dominant body image that we receive. It all is a political negotiation of the people who that have produced it. And even the one you click on versus the one you don't click on is a political negotiation you're making. Not to be awkward, but I mean that would be one of somebody said that's pure entertainment, right? No, it's not. No, it's not. No, it's not. It's a political negotiation made and created using political choices.

SPEAKER_00 20:55

And that would play into any of the literature that has so much spice in it, or the literature that falls into the realm that you're talking about, because there is a great deal of literature that falls into that realm as well. I remember when I was a little girl sneaking into that section, you know, the one with all the men leaning over the scantily clad women, you know, looking like they're about to ravage them. You know, mom never wanted me in that section, you know. So I remember that. That's political negotiation right there.

SPEAKER_01 21:21

I go back to our discussion about um Anderson W Frost Throws, Feathers, and Bones. And when you mentioned that, you know, you felt that the main male character was sexually assaulted.

SPEAKER_00 21:31

Right.

SPEAKER_01 21:31

And that in itself, whether or not you were comfortable receiving it or like I was at first or not, was because it was a political moment within the book.

SPEAKER_00 21:40

It is. Yes, I agree. So we get down to this fact that yes, indeed, we would sit here and agree that everything then really is a political negotiation. So to sit on Facebook or any place else and say, man, I'm just tired of everything being political is kind of a futile statement to make.

SPEAKER_01 21:59

That's a very privileged statement to make, too. It is. Because it says that you have a comfortable place to go where you can sit within your own politics, like you said, the status quo, but that is a privilege. There are many, many, many, many people who have no comfortable place to retreat for their pure entertainment, quote unquote. Because too much is being said about them and who they are and what they deserve and what they do not deserve and what their value is as a human being.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

And that is very true. And that's where you get into really looking at the marginalized groups and the exclusion of so many people, the number of people that have been excluded over time in the canon and popular literature and in film and on the stage, we have come so far, but in art. We have lacked diversity for centuries and we've come so far now. But we can sit and go, if you're within a certain demographic, you can go, you know, I'm comfortable, comfortable, comfortable, but other people aren't there.

SPEAKER_01 22:56

Which is why so many of these people feel like these groups came out of nowhere, right? Where were all the trans people? Where were all the gay people? Where were all, you know, they were there, but they were not represented by the canon. And so you experienced a different reality than theirs.

SPEAKER_00 23:10

Right. I am not a Bridgerton watcher. And I know we've had these types of discussions before. It's like I'm not into the, what is it, romanticy. It's like I'm not as much into the romanticy as I know other people that I love are. But I know of Bridgerton, and I do pay attention to it. I did watch the first season of Bridgerton, so I at least have that much experience with the show. This newer season with the lesbian couple. I've read so much about, oh, as if, like, you know, in society during that time, that would have been completely unacceptable. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. People, do you know how many lesbians there were in that time period? I mean, just pause for a second. How many lesbians, how many people of color? They were everywhere. Okay. The LGBTQ community has been alive and thriving for a very long time. We were just not comfortable enough with it to see it. Like it was not out in the forefront because society didn't want to do it. You know, the societal construct was like, oh no, you're over there. But they were there. So it being pushed out to the forefront is nice, you know.

SPEAKER_01 24:15

But you can't persecute anything out of existence.

SPEAKER_00 24:17

Like you just say, no, no, no, we should continue to marginalize it on the screen as it was marginalized back in, you know, whatever time period. That's just stupid.

SPEAKER_01 24:26

Well, off topic, but those people obviously aren't watching the show because in the last couple seasons there's been tons of gay sex. So I don't know what they're complaining about now.

SPEAKER_00 24:34

But but it was more hidden. And now it's like, whoosh, we've got this. And now they're like, oh, ah, you know, and it's it's okay. Why are you upset? Like, this is ancient Rome, ancient Greece. Like, this is not new.

SPEAKER_01 24:47

I personally never understood why representing reality just as it actually is has to become some kind of agenda.

SPEAKER_00 24:54

Yeah, we're woke.

SPEAKER_01 24:55

Or woke. The agenda is when you try to represent reality as you would want it. Right. And and we are all tempted, we are all tempted to do that. We are all tempted to do that. When you are trying to erase something, that's an agenda.

SPEAKER_00 25:09

Yes, so that's what I'm saying. We have had the agenda as in the white majority, the heterosexual majority, the majority, the Christian majority.

SPEAKER_01 25:18

The male majority.

SPEAKER_00 25:19

The male majority, those are the agendas that have existed for hundreds of years. Those are the agendas that have been suppressing reality for hundreds of years. I need you to hear me on this.

SPEAKER_01 25:30

And breaking from that status quo, quote unquote, is political.

SPEAKER_00 25:34

It is.

SPEAKER_01 25:35

It is political.

SPEAKER_00 25:36

Yes. But it's no more political than you trying to suppress it.

SPEAKER_01 25:41

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

So, wake-up call.

SPEAKER_01 25:43

Yeah, it's political, but the agenda at work here is the truth of reality. Right. It doesn't have to be the truth of how you should believe things or whatever. That's your own personal opinion. But the truth of reality as it really is, that's the political agenda there.

The One Question To Take Away

SPEAKER_00 25:56

Yes. Everyone can internalize their own beliefs. Everyone can choose what they read and they don't read. Everyone can choose what they watch and they don't watch. But everything is political. Everything is the story of humanity. Everything is the story of power. Everything is the story of identity. We are all negotiating it. We all have the right to negotiate it. We all have the right to interact with it on our own basis. And none of us have the right to control it for anyone else. So stop doing that.

SPEAKER_01 26:25

So I think that we can boil this discussion down to one key signature question, and that is that when you read a text, are you discovering what's already there or revealing what you brought into it? And my answer to that question would be yes.

SPEAKER_00 26:41

Yes. I'll agree.

SPEAKER_01 26:42

Yeah. We hope you've enjoyed our first lit on trial discussion about reading and politics. Our next discussion will be about loving the art even when you are not fond of the artist.

SPEAKER_00 26:56

Yep, and that'll be a good one.