Editorials
Years ago, in what seems now to be another lifetime, when I taught literature courses, I would ask my university students to look for le donné — the given. Those were the parts of a society, of a particular time and place, that found their way into a text without the author consciously putting them there.
Those societal norms are much easier to see and identify from a distance. When we are living amongst them, they often don’t register.
