Tag Archives: censorship

When a Novel SHOULD Disturb

By Robin Bates | Published: November 30, 2021

An author recounts how he encountered de factor censorship when trying to publish a novel on Congolese child soldiers.

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Rightwing Book Bans On the Rise

By Robin Bates | Published: November 11, 2021

Banning books is set of accelerate and English teachers and librarians will find themselves as targets, just like medical professionals before them.

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Tennessee Returns to the Scopes Days

By Robin Bates | Published: July 12, 2021

With rightwing attacks on Tennessee teachers, the Scopes Monkey Trial seems relevant again. Time to revisit “Inherit the Wind.”

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Milton on Cancel Culture

By Robin Bates | Published: March 8, 2021

Yale professor Bromwich applies Milton to the cancel culture debate.

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Puritans vs. Cavalier Theatre

By Robin Bates | Published: February 6, 2019

Thursday I’m currently immersed in John Stubbs’s Reprobates, an account of the cavalier poets during England’s 17th century civil war. I met John when I was in Ljubljana—he’s married to a Slovenian high court judge and teaches at the international high school—and the work is even more enthralling than his biography of Jonathan Swift, which […]

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Beware of Literature’s Purity Police

By Robin Bates | Published: November 3, 2017

Laura Moriarty’s “American Heart” has been attacked for being a white savior narrative. Such stories should in fact be critiqued, but the attackers are often a bigger problem.

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Great Lit Changes Expectations Horizons

By Robin Bates | Published: September 1, 2017

Hans Robert Jauss’s believes that great literature changes horizons of expectation whereas lesser lit simply confirms them. If “Madame Bovary” was brought to trial, Jauss says, it is because it charted a new course in literary history that people didn’t understand.

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i sing of Kaepernick glad and big

By Robin Bates | Published: September 7, 2016

The case of NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick not standing for the national anthem brings to mind E. E. Cummings’s “i sing of Olaf,” where an American conscientious objector refuses to honor the flag and is tortured.

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Literature as a Public Event

By Robin Bates | Published: August 7, 2016

In my Theories of the Reader senior seminar, I will have my students study a literary work that became a public event. In today’s post I list a number of possibilities.

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