Banning Books In America – Samuel Cohen

The overwhelming majority of books singled out for cleansing are recently published works that focus on LGBTQ themes or race. But a handful of classics still make the cut to be cut, as it were: from Kurt Vonnegut in Gladwin, MI and James Baldwin in Clay County, FL all the way back to Chaucer in Wentzville, MO. Nottaway County, Virginia’s list of “sexually explicit” books to be avoided includes Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Beowulf, and The Importance of Being Earnest.

Academics and op-ed columnists have been wringing their hands over what this means for America’s youth. I have my own, entirely selfish concerns. After looking through a masochistically large number of these lists, I can report that I have not encountered a single work from the eighteenth century. As someone who teaches eighteenth-century literature, I know I should be happy about this. But on some level, it feels like a slight. Are there really no eighteenth-century texts as edgy or boundary-pushing or “sexually explicit” as Beowulf?

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels features attempted rape, public urination, plus a detailed description of pubic hair. Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders could hardly contain more bannable material. Likewise for Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Yet none of these eighteenth-century texts get a mention. What do you have to do to get cancelled in this town? One reason to be nervous about this is that the period’s absence from conservative ban lists seems to align somewhat uncomfortably with the pop-academic idea that eighteenth-century texts and ideas are naturally right-wing friendly.

A number of progressive writers have been pushing such claims recently. One laments “the present-day impact of ideals forged in the 1600s and 1700s” (to wit: the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict was “due to America’s Founding Fathers embracing Locke’s absurd ideas”); another suggests that the “legacy” of the eighteenth century is “Enlightenment ideas of race and white supremacy.” Serious academics have long issued more nuanced versions of this argument. Roger Eatwell argued that “fascism is …

PART ONE Writers on Book Banning The Woodcutters Lydia Millet Jane Smiley on What It’s Like to Have Your Book Banned Tai Caputo Keep Kids Reading Carol Weston From U.S.!: A Novel Chris Bachelder PART TWO Arguments About Book Banning Why Americans Must Speak Up to Defend Educational Autonomy Jeremy C. Young and Jacqueline Allain From the Word to the World Emily Drabinski Is It Ever OK to Ban a Book? Leonard Cassuto Reading Howl across the Iron Curtain, or Why Our Cold War Ideas About Banned Books May No Longer be Helping Brian K.

Goodman Banning the Enlightenment Aaron Santesso Why It’s Okay to Call It a Ban Emily Harris PART THREE Teachers on Book Banning 11 12 13 14 “Amputate the Problem, Band-Aid the Solution”: Censoring Toni Morrison Amardeep Singh Banned Books in Transnational Contexts: Censorship in School Curricula in Wisconsin and India Lopamudra Basu Illiberal Education Annie Abrams A Banned Books Course Syllabus with Historical Notes, Unfortunate Puns, and Books, Lots of Books Samuel Cohen Acknowledgments Contributors Bibliography Index 1kitap1.com/en Introduction Samuel Cohen This is a book about book banning in America, and so it is a book about America.

The administration occupying the White House during the time of this book’s publication has spent its first months in office attacking the foundations of our society, unlawfully withdrawing funding from and restricting the work of agencies and institutions that work to keep people fed, healthy, educated, and protected from discrimination. Members and state officials of this administration’s party have spent the past few years attacking these same agencies and institutions, from the Department of Education to their local public libraries and schools.

These attacks include attempts to control access to books. Like many of us, I have watched in horror and anger over the last few years as the country has returned to the culture wars of the 1990s, which were themselves a return to the Red Scare 1950s, which were in turn a return to all of the times in our history that some of those in power have benefitted and even encouraged division and demonization.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 05bf886ec1d7ac5c
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 2,019,622 bytes (1.926 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 164
• Language: English (en)

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• Total Words: 44,038
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• Average Words per Page: 268.52
• Average Characters per Page: 1725.43

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