At the Swedish Academy’s press conference for Handke’s Nobel win, Handke addressed the journalists attending the event, who’d asked the author about his history of genocide denial. Handke declared, “My people are readers, not you.” Only someone who believes that readers must necessarily practice the kind of resolutely nonpolitical critical thinking that would absolve and protect him from deeper scrutiny would make this pointed distinction (are journalists not readers?). It’s a tellingly autocratic vision of the relationship between an author and a readership; that we as readers are an author’s
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