Writing about Disney’s live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, this time complete with a multicultural cast consisting of no fewer than seven racially distinct daughters of Triton, Angelica Jade Bastién argued in New York that Disney was “taking advantage of those who believe film is a mirror or a moral tool.

Recent art and film reviews in mainstream publications likewise suggest the possibility that we are reaching a tipping point. The rise of “postcritique”-a mode of scholarship that finds meaning in the full diversity of our personal and social responses to art-signals a similar pivot in some English departments, while in the broader culture the aftermath of the Trump years has been marked by a steady retreat from feverish activist critique and a new hunger for style, humor and frivolity (TikTok, not Twitter Red Scare, not Rachel Maddow).

The extent of this shift in critical sensibility is hard to measure, but what some have labeled the “aesthetic turn” is not limited to the literary reviews. Artists and critics-their laurel bearers-should take heed. For all its good intentions, art that tries to minister to its audience by showcasing moral aspirants and paragons or the abject victims of political oppression produces smug, tiresome works that are failures both as art and as agitprop. From Lauren Oyler’s observation that “anxieties about being a good person, surrounded by good people, pervade contemporary novels and criticism” to Parul Sehgal’s exhortation against the ubiquitous “trauma plot” that “flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom, and … insists upon its moral authority” to Garth Greenwell’s lament about a literary culture that “is as moralistic as it has ever been in my lifetime”-the critical vanguard has made its judgment clear. The professional critics-and not just the old, curmudgeonly ones-are fed up with moralizing, and they are willing to speak about it in public. The critical tide is turning, once again.

Flat character in literature