Digital SAT Reading and Writing Practice Question #532

Text 1 In analyzing the explosion of literary realism in the mid-19th century, scholars often emphasize its moral dimensions. Writers like Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac abandoned the idealized romanticism of their predecessors precisely because they sought to wield literature as a tool for social reform, explicitly forcing the bourgeoisie to confront the grimy, hypocritical realities of the industrial revolution. Text 2 It is overly reductive to view 19th-century literary realism primarily through the lens of a moral crusade. The movement was largely an epistemological crisis triggered by the advent of photography. Once the camera demonstrated an objective, mechanical reflection of reality, novelists were pressured to adapt their prose to mirror this new, unflinching standard of observation, making aesthetic objectivity—not social activism—their foundational imperative. Based on the texts, how would the author of Text 2 most likely respond to the primary claim made by the scholars mentioned in Text 1?