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The other thing about uncomfortable, awful, terrible, ~romanticized~ fiction that gets lost in censorship conversations is the fact that in your regular non-academic life you don’t have to read it.
“I’ve experienced x so I don’t want to read y” is a complete sentence when it comes to fiction. It doesn’t even have to be trauma, tbh. I’d encourage you to face you discomfort sometimes but if you don’t want to read Lolita or American Psycho or watch Apocalypse Now or whatever skieves you out, just…don’t?
A big part of literature literacy is going “not for me” and moving on.
Also just “I don’t want to read x” is a complete sentence. You don’t need to justify yourself, and you don’t need direct trauma with a subject to find it upsetting or want to steer clear at times.
Yes, this!
I don’t generally like reading realistic fiction as much. I prefer fantasy/sci-fi.
Not wanting to read something that can be a trauma trigger because you just prefer not to, or prefer something else, in my head is really no different from a genre preference!
There’s a conversation to be had about reading different genres and subjects if you’re specifically trying to develop critical literary analysis skills, but the truth of the matter is, for casual reading, there’s basically zero reason that you have to read anything you don’t want to.
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