I didn't think of it before, but this discussion also reminds me a little of one of Barbara Kingsolver's essays--"Jabberwocky," from High Tide in Tucson,--which is in a lot of ways her statement on the purpose and meaning of literature. (I swear, I've worked this essay into a dozen papers over the years). Anyway, at one point she talks about some letters she got in response to Animal Dreams, where the main character's sister is murdered while volunteering in Guatemala (and the novel is dedicated to a young man who actually did die under similar circumstances). As I recall without the book in front of me, she got one letter from a nun who had also been volunteering there, and who knew other nuns who had been murdered or tortured, thanking her for bringing the issue to light via the novel. But she also got a letter from a reader who said she stopped reading the novel when she realized Halle was going to die, because she said that she had come to believe that violent scenes in fiction, even when intended for noble or aesthetic purposes, essentially boiled down to using violence as entertainment.

It's not a position I can embrace, and the parts of the letter Kingsolver quotes are obviously written emotionally rather than critically. (Which isn't to say it's not a thoughtful response, it's just personal rather than detached, which is how I think we're trained to respond to Questions about Literature). But I still like that Kingsolver admits that it got to her, and that although it didn't mean she was ready to start censoring herself and the stories she felt were important, it helped her articulate a sort of perpetual uneasiness which made her thoughtful.

Of course, Kingsolver is doing this as a very, very polished writer--and in her essays, when she writes about her own divorce or miscarriage or rape she tends to be quite terse--so it's not quite the same instinct as angstfic, but I think it's related.