Banned Books Literary Fiction and the Specter of Censorship

Course description: The history of U.S. literature and culture is also the history of censorship. Some of the most renowned (and nowadays canonized) works were banned at some point in time. What were the political and social reasons for such ostracism? How did censorship influence the reception of the texts and how did the public imagination react to these forms of restriction? In what way have the criteria of social control changed in the course of time? Which banned books do we know today? Did we know that they were banned? We will look at some infamous cases of censorship, such as John Cleland's Fanny Hall (1748), Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951), and Allen Ginsberg's poem »Howl« (1955) and discuss the reasons for their exclusion from public discourse. How does our knowledge that these works were banned change our perception of them? And, paying attention to modern ways of censorship: Have modes of cultural suppression outlived themselves in the age of the Internet? We will also take a look at the handling of censorship in other media: the Hays Code in Hollywood since the 1930s, the Comics Code Authority in the 1950s, and the Communications Decency Act of 1996. An excursus to the realm of music will explore the effects of indecency standards in scandals such as the so-called »Nipplegate« during the 2004 life-broadcast of the Super Bowl involving Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake and the consequences on sales figures. Anglistik - Amerikanistik Lehramtsstudiengänge: abgeschlossene Zwischenprüfung Universität Siegen 20111 SoSe 2011 Priv.-Doz. Dr. Brandt Stefan L Priv Doz