BANNED LITERATURE

Catalog description

What makes a work of literature offensive? And by whom? This course examines a variety of literary works that have been viewed as subversive in different cultural, historical and socio-political contexts. Exploring writers' engagement with the transgression of social codes, the course asks, what can we learn about a culture from its controversial literature? Can a text banned in one culture be enthusiastically received in another? In what ways is taboo literature powerful as it moves across racial, gender, cultural, and geo-political divides? In probing these questions, the course delves into slippery notions of what is 'bannable' in various landscapes of literary remapping. 001997