Suggestions that certain classics come with “trigger warnings” leads of the following reflection.
Tag Archives: censorship
Warning Labels for the Classics
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Geoffrey Chaucer, Homer, Iliad, Importance of Being Earnest, John Milton, Oscar Wilde, Paradise Lost, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Wife of Bath Comments closed
Parents, Kids, Schools & Banned Books
Parents pressure schools to ban books because they want to protect their children. Their children want the books because they have a different set of needs.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged adolescence, Are You There God It's Me Margaret, Book banning, Catcher in the Rye, Education, Harry Potter, J. D. Salinger, J. K. Rowling, Judy Blume, Perks of Being a Wall Flower, Stephen Chbotsky Comments closed
When Werther-Fever Upended Europe
Goethe’s “Sorrows of Young Werther” created a sensation in 1774, with a young cult following and older attackers.
Schools Cowed by the Religious Right
Holly Blumner had a vision. A member of the St. Mary’s theater department, Holly wanted to stage Susan Zeder’s Mother Hicks, a adolescent girl’s identity quest, and then take it into area schools. This post is the story about how rightwing groups have so terrified our schools that the vision died.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged adolescence, Huck Finn, Mark Twain, Mother Hicks, Song of Solomon, Susan Zeder, Toni Morrison Comments closed
Damn the N-Word, Full Speed Ahead
Writing about interracial friendships in yesterday’s post brings to mind the most famous interracial friendship in literature, that between Huck and Jim. The novel is once again in the news (is it ever out of it?) with a new edition of the novel where the n-word is changed to “slave.” The edition is the brainchild […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, racism, teaching literature Comments closed
The Burning of the Books
In Ben Click’s post yesterday on the banning history of Huckleberry Finn, he tells the story of a man who remembers hearing the book read to him when he was a child in a concentration camp. Horst Kruse never forgot that reading experience and would go on to become a Twain scholar. Ben talks about […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Banning of the Books", Bertolt Brecht, book burning, Nazis Comments closed
Huck Finn’s Censorship History
I have always been fascinated by the many ways that literature influences our lives, but, as a literary scholar, I also know that influence is a very hard thing to prove. That’s why I find censorship to be interesting. When people censor a book, they do so because they assume that it can have an […]
Ignoring Books–Another Way to Burn Them
Read, reflect, act. That is my vision for how we should respond to literature. Therefore I was pleased to see a version of this advice appearing in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. I’m reading Bradbury’s dystopia because I will be leading a discussion of it tom0rrow as part of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Big […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Education, Fahrenheit 451, Jon Meacham, Liberal Arts, Ray Bradbury Comments closed
Honoring Our Inner Wild Rumpus
Illustration from Where the Wild Things Are I see that Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) has been turned into a film, which has led Slate columnist Jack Shafer to revisit a controversy about the book. Apparently Sendak still can’t let go of a critique by psychologist Bruno Bettelheim. I was surprised to learn […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Cat in the Hat, Children, Dr. Seuss, Maaurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are Comments closed
