Mathieu Bock-Côté: "The desire to re-educate Western men"

In The Supernumerary Man , a novel published in 2018, Patrice Jean had the brilliant intuition to stage a character whose job is to rewrite the classics of literature to make them compatible with the values ​​of our time. But as is too often the case, reality has just gone beyond fiction. In some American publishing houses, the trend is towards the hiring of “sensitivity readers”. Their role? Revise the manuscripts to track down racial prejudice or gender stereotypes and ensure a positive representation of diversity in the published text, which should be freed from the grip of "white patriarchy". Perfect political commissioners, they read the works from an ideological grid and distribute the good and bad points. Literature must submit to it or withdraw from it.

It is hard not to think of censorship in the days of the USSR: here too, the texts had to pass before the eyes of the regime's readers, who ensured that

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