This is a book about banned books in the U.S. - about reading them, teaching them, and assigning them under the shadow of political pressure not to. Banning Books in America includes reflections by novelists on banning and being banned, arguments about the histories and politics of book banning, readings of banned books in national and international contexts, and responses to new legislation by anti-censorship advocates, teachers, and librarians. Together, these writers and educators provide a view from the trenches of the wars on reading and on educational freedom - on the freedom to learn and teach without constraint - and, if not a blueprint, at least some ideas not just about what it means to ban books but also about how to fight back against the forces that would ban them.

Autorentext
Samuel Cohen is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia, USA, where he teaches a course on banned books. He is the author of After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s (Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2010) and co-editor of The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (2012) and The Clash Takes on the World (Bloomsbury, 2017). He is the series editor of The New American Canon: The Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture.

Klappentext

This is a book about banned books in the U.S. - about reading them, teaching them, and lending them under the shadow of political pressure not to.

Banning Books in America features novelists on banning and being banned, arguments about the histories and politics of book banning, readings of banned books in national and international contexts, and responses to new legislation by anti-censorship advocates, teachers, and librarians. Together, these writers and educators provide a view from the trenches of the wars on reading. They offer, if not a single blueprint, models for how to think about what it means to ban books and how to fight back against the forces that would ban them.

This book shows that at the heart of this issue is the question of what books mean to people. Some Americans are determined to decide which books other Americans shouldn't get to read. Why these books? Why now? Anyone who seeks to answer these questions must examine the context, historical and current, in which Americans allow this to happen.

This is a book about book banning in America, and so it is a book about America.

Inhalt

Introduction
Samuel Cohen (University of Missouri, USA)
Part. 1: Writers on Book Banning

1. The Woodcutters
   Lydia Millet
2. Jane Smiley on What It's Like to Have Your Book Banned
   Tai Caputo (Iowa City High School, USA)
3. Keep Kids Reading
   Carol Weston

4. From U.S.!: A Novel
   Chris Bachelder

   Part 2. Arguments About Book Banning

5. Why Americans Must Speak Up to Defend University Autonomy
   Jeremy Young and Jacqueline Allain (PEN America)
6. From the Word to the World
   Emily Drabinski (American Library Association)
7. Is It Ever Ok to Ban a Book?
   Leonard Cassuto (Fordham University, USA)
8. Reading Howl across the Iron Curtain, or Why Our Cold War Ideas About Banned Books May No Longer be Helping
   Brian Goodman (Arizona State University, USA)
9. Banning the Enlightenment
   Aaron Santesso (Georgia Tech, USA)

10. Why It's Okay to Call It a Ban
    Emily Harris (Annie's Foundation)

    Part 3: Teachers on Book Banning

11. "Amputate the Problem, Band-Aid the Solution": Censoring Toni Morrison
    Amardeep Singh (Lehigh University, USA)
12. Banned Books in Transnational Contexts: Censorship in School Curricula in Wisconsin and India
    Lopamudra Basu (University of Wisconsin - Stout, USA)
13. Illiberal Education
    Annie Abrams (The Bronx High School of Science, USA)

14. A Banned Books Course Syllabus with Historical Notes, Unfortunate Puns, and Books, Lots of Books
    Samuel Cohen (University of Missouri, USA)

    Acknowledgments
    Notes on Contributors
    Bibliography
    Index