CLCS 312 Contraband: Censorship and Book Banning Over the Last Two Centuries
Classical literary texts have been challenged, censored, banned and burned over the last two centuries with disconcerting regularity. The tradition is old, the reasons varied, and the list long containing, for instance, works by Boccaccioi, Goethe, Lewis Carroll, Flaubert, Balzac, Hemingway, Helen Keller, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rushdie, Tony Morrison, and, most recently, Maus by Art Spiegelman. This course investigates different kinds of censorship such as pre-publication censorship, censorship by schools, libraries, and disciplinary canons, as well as the legal, social and political pressures brought to bear on authors, and publishers by entities from school boards to entire regimes.
The class will read a range of texts that have been censored, banned or burned in order to understand the reasons and the contexts in which they were deemed unfit to be read and how the ban influenced not only the respective formation, reception and production of "dangerous" literature and authors, but also the notion of the reader as an endangered and vulnerable figure.