Banned Books

3 units

Why would anyone want to burn a book? Under what circumstances would you support censorship? Several years ago, a Russian student was exiled to Siberia for possessing a copy of Emerson's Essays. Today, school boards in the United States regularly call for the removal of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye from classrooms and library shelves. Actions like these dramatize the complex interconnections of literature and society, and they raise questions about what we read and the way we read. We will explore these issues by looking closely at several American and translated European texts that have been challenged on moral, sociopolitical, or religious grounds; we will try to determine what some readers have found so threatening about these works. Possible authors: Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Defoe, Hawthorne, Flaubert, Twain, Chopin, Brecht, Salinger, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury. Brief daily writing assignments. This course is directed primarily, though not exclusively, to future teachers.