Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
It seems to me that you are forgetting where you are, that perhaps you are trying to continue an argument from another thread. Here we are discussing Around the World in Eighty Days and it is presumed the participants have already read it. So "confirmation bias" and or "skewed" perceptions are not really applicable. We've read the book, and now we're exploring our reactions. So this...
seems ungenerous. I might counter with, "If you fail to look at all then you will imagine prejudice does not exist whether it exists or not." But neither is a particularly useful generalisation.
Perhaps some people do take the search for offensive material too far, but at the other extreme are those who refuse to hear anything bad about a beloved work. However, most of us live somewhere in the vast middle ground, and it's not helpful to accuse us of offences we have not committed.
It would be more generous to suppose that someone might notice some prejudice, if it exists, just from casual reading, and that, should they look more closely, what they find might indeed be real and not imagined. And, if a person chooses, they might listen to others and learn new perspectives that on their own they would not have found. Certainly that is one of the reasons I am here. So I am not a fan of statements like the one quoted above, that seem intent on deriding input before it has even been offered.
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Again a fair point but I was not accusing
everyone int he thread of "If you fail to look at all then you will imagine prejudice does not exist whether it exists or not." and confirmation bias. If I really was accusing everyone of that I would be worse than ungenerous.
If it came out that way I apologise.
I was thinking of certain critics, academics and others.
And yes you are right "If you fail to look at all then you will imagine prejudice does not exist whether it exists or not." but it must be accepted that books written in the past will contain thoughts and ideas that we almost certainly will find wrong and offensive today, be it racism, sexism, classism, etc.
Saying "this book was written in 1870 and may contain ideas and offensive attitudes only needs saying once when it is presented to the book club. It does not need postings that "This book is "XXXist". Get on and talk about the text, plot and characters.
I only came on this thread by accident and started reading it because I like and enjoyed Jules Verne as a boy.