
Virginia Woolf? Snob! Richard Wright? Sexist! Dostoyevsky? Anti-Semite - Tomte
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/books/review/edith-wharton-house-of-mirth-anti-semitism.html
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"It’s as if we imagine an old book to be a time machine that brings the writer
to us. We buy a book and take it home, and the writer appears before us,
asking to be admitted into our company. If we find that the writer’s views are
ethnocentric or sexist or racist, we reject the application, and we bar his or
her entry into the present.

As the student had put it, I don’t want anyone like that in my house.

I think we’d all be better readers if we realized that it isn’t the writer
who’s the time traveler. It’s the reader. When we pick up an old novel, we’re
not bringing the novelist into our world and deciding whether he or she is
enlightened enough to belong here; we’re journeying into the novelist’s world
and taking a look around."

