Reading is expansive, not exclusive. If Caribbean, African, Arab, and Indian writers get more attention today, if the Booker prize is won by Ben Okri from Nigeria or Peter Carey from Sydney, if readers approach the work of women and blacks without prejudice and without the sense of tiptoeing up on a special case, our shared culture grows and rejoices. We learn how other kinds of cultural consciousness can occupy the speaking center of literary forms. But how could this conceivably be a reason for not reading Eugene Onegin or Pope's Epistle to Lord Burlington?
- From Culture of Complaint: A Passionate Look into the Ailing Heart of America by Robert Hughes (published in 1993)
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