Forbidden Texts

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course is a seminar exploration of forbidden texts, defined broadly, through in-depth examination of texts which were banned at some point, somewhere, in some fashion. The class will analyze each text’s social context, authorship, reasons for censorship or scandal, and historical legacy. Concurrently, we will examine how the scholarly literature has evaluated the works in question; fit them into a historical framework; and constructed various theories as to what constitutes a text worth forbidding. Following analysis of such cases, students should be able to construct a typology of factors which might render a work controversial, and test that typology against an outlined creation of their own.