The recent rise of sensitivity readers in publishing raises two fundamental questions: first, what kind of "sensitivity"? And second, what kind of "reader"?
What is now clear is that the sensitivity in question isn’t to tone, rhythm, or narrative structure. It is not, in other words, literary sensitivity. Rather, it is sensitivity to feelings, and specifically to those associated with certain, pre-identified groups, whose day-to-day life is supposedly captured under the heading of that great incontestable of the woke age: “lived experience”. From there, everything is filtered through a script of systemic oppression.
But surely these sensitive “sensitivity readers” are at least trained in literary analysis? Not quite. In most cases, what qualifies them to advise authors on how a given identity should be represented is simply their status as a purported representative of a particular group or experience. It’s not difficult to see how this identitarian solipsism might become a problem when editorial decisions demand a nuanced understanding of an author’s lexical, syntactic and rhetorical choices.
Typically, sensitivity readers are brought in after structural edits and copyedits, combing through the manuscript for any element of character, plot or narrative development that might cause offense. Sometimes this means advising the removal of individual words, sometimes entire scenes, character traits, or narrative arcs.
Underlying this nascent profession is a kind of naïve, pre-Wittgensteinian correspondence theory of style, in which literary representations are judged “true” or “adequate” only insofar as they match some presumed external reality. In other words: does the character “ring true” to the reader’s idea of reality? If, as Thomas Aquinas once wrote, “truth is the adequation of things and intellect”, then the sensitivity reader becomes the sovereign guarantor of that adequation.
Underlying this nascent profession is a kind of naïve, pre-Wittgensteinian correspondence theory of style, in which literary representations are judged “true” or “adequate” only insofar as they match some presumed external reality.
And yet those of us living in the post-positivist era know things aren’t so simple. If literary meaning is a function of use, not mere correspondence, then text is embedded in genre, context, idiom, and can’t simply be verified by “lived experience”.
The confusion now runs so deep that the industry’s obsession with authenticity has begun producing editors who genuinely believe men shouldn’t write female characters, because they lack the experience required to capture the essential “truth” of that identity.
Writing in The Spectator, Zoë Dubno laments this “obsession with reading for verisimilitude in literature” and questions whether the experience of one individual can ever represent the collective experience of all:
I could just imagine a female sensitivity reader marking up the proofs of Anna Karenina and writing: “It’s not believable that a woman would jump in front of a train because she thinks her boyfriend cheated on her”. Would the publishers then have to find a woman who had jumped out in front of a train?
