"She adored Catherine Sloper and Daisy Miller, two very different Jamesian protagonists, both rebels in their own ways.
When I left that university, I lost touch with Razieh. Years later, another former student told me about being arrested in the 1980s, during the protests against the Cultural Revolution. While in jail, she had met Razieh. They reminisced about my classes and spent many hours talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 'The Great Gatsby' and James’s 'Washington Square.' 'We had fun,' she said. Fun? I wondered. There was a pause in our conversation. 'You know,' she finally said, 'Razieh was executed.'
I didn’t know. Never when I was her teacher could I have imagined that Razieh would someday be in jail, thinking and talking about Henry James, awaiting her execution...
It is alarming to think that American communities in 2022 are actively seeking to deprive people of the reading experiences for which my students in Iran paid such a heavy price.... Book-banning is a form of silencing, and it is the next step along a continuum...."
From "I witnessed brutal censorship in Iran. We should all take U.S. book bans as a warning" by Azar Nafisi (WaPo).
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53 comments:
"Book-banning is a form of silencing"
Yes, but progs are a bit more subtle. They don't need to "ban" anything as long as they have the power to set curriculum and assign readings. An occasional misstep gives the game away--banning Dr. Seuss, say--but until recently they could proceed undisturbed.
"Yes, but progs are a bit more subtle."
Don't be dishonest. The move to ban books in America is not just a recent phenomenon and it has come from all points of the political spectrum, (but more often, I suspect, from the right).
Like the VA school boards, Cook blames the right for trying to oust child pornography from fourth grade libraries.
A book is not "banned" simply because it is not made compulsory reading by a school's curriculum.
"As the American media theorist Neil Postman observed: "In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure."
"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no-one who wanted to read one," Postman wrote.
"Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism."
The left want to ban anything that doesn't fit THEIR power-obsessed narrative.
Oh, the hideous power of the rural Tennessee school board!
/eyeroll
I appreciate the sentiment. But while some authors don't deserve to be burned, they deserve to restricted to certain audience. For example, reading Saul Bellow could be used to punish prisoners for misbehavior.
Most of the book bans people complain about today aren't bans at all, but just removing books from the mandatory curriculum in schools. One level above that is removing them from school libraries. I've heard about that. But the next level -- removing books from public libraries -- have there been any such efforts recently?
The only actual book banning campaigns I can think of are the recent efforts to prevent publishers, bookstores and Amazon from selling books critical of transgender ideology. And while disturbing, I think they've been largely a failure because the market has too many channels to block them all. I guess there was also the effort to suppress that one Dr. Seuss book a few years ago. Publisher refused to reprint, and I think some e-retailer was taking down listings, or being pressured to or something.
Either way, it's not a top down book ban in the old style. Thanks to the First Amendment, that sort of comprehensive book ban isn't even feasible in the US. Only way you could do it, I think, is by acquiring copyright and blocking publication, but that won't prevent resale of existing copies.
The n-word is a book. A lit crit expert couldn't write on it today though. Wm. Empson would have had a great chapter on it in The Structure of Complex Words, the n-word in literature and analysis of the interplay of subject and predicate within the word in each case. Context calls out the various possibilities for each, and for each choice there's a resulting doctrine.
Where were all these ant-book ban people when Mark Twain, Harper Lee and Dr. Seuss were being banned?
Would it be cool for me to give my school library a complete set of the Gor novels? (wanna bet it already has Fifty Shades of Grey?)
AMZN disappeared about 20 years of my book reviews because I had one snarky review about a book on global warming.
With the left, it is okay to be in the book business and also censor. It is like athletes against fitness.
Motte: Daisy Miller
Bailey: Girls Who Do It with Dogs
It's not about what's 'banned,' it's what's about doesn't get published.
It's about what book doesn't get reviewed. Or when it does, gets trashed.
It's about what kinds of books make it into a school library or curriculum.
There are many ways of banning books without banning books...
(but more often, I suspect, from the right).
Like he said, the left is more subtle. Movies just disappear from streaming services, books are gone from Kindle. No uproar. On the other hand, the MSM, being left of center, will never miss an opportunity to paint any kind of event where a lefty favorite book is deprecated, that they see as "right wing," and it will be forced onto the national consciousness.
You can complain about motes and beams (Matthew 7:1-5 KJV) but it is a very good thing whenever anyone on the left complains about censorship.
The only thing close to an actual book banning, was the successful effort to get a few Dr. Seuss books taken out of print. This effort was pushed from the left.
All the right has done is push to stop schools from using wildly inappropriate works as part of the curriculum. Anybody who wants those works can still obtain them, often in the same school's library.
Banning of books, music, art and people usually correlates with a loss of power by one side of the political divide or the other, in my experience. Biden's crew is running scared for November, and the right just lost its president. So both sides are pulling craptastic power plays for attention and feelz.
A book is not "banned" simply because it is not made compulsory reading by a school's curriculum.
Or by not being purchased at taxpayer expense for an elementary school (or even a high school) library.
Of course the piece is offered to try to elide the difference between these actions, which are curation for an underage audience, and book-banning, the criminalization of ownership or consumption of a book. So that all the Good People can be made to remember that we're still living out the Scopes Monkey Trial and Jim Crow and hell, why not, the Inquisition, thanks to the evil Right.
I'll just echo what others have said. We have censorship in the USA, its just not called that. We have books destroyed, but they're not burned in public. They're just removed from libraries, not allowed to be printed, and in some cases Amazon/BN/etc. won't sell them.
Leftists and others actually boast of it.
Or the books aren't allowed to be printed in the first place. I've often wondered why Joseph Goebbels complete diary isn't published and available in English. Its been available for almost 30 years. An important historical document, no? But nope you can buy it in German, some of it. And there are stories of famous authors writing books and no one will publish them because they break some taboo or the Publishers don't like the politics.
In the USA when people talk about "banned books" and how terrible it is, its usually because its about pornography, or its some Leftist. These people really aren't against "banning books" they just don't want books THEY like banned.
Last comment. I think there was an instance Amazon actually deleting books from people's kindles. It seems that you don't really own the Ebook. You just lease it from Amazon. And if Amazon decides to "burn it", your copy goes into the electronic bonfire.
Robert Cook said...
(but more often, I suspect, from the right).
Perhaps you could provide some examples of banned books from the right?
Here's 3 recent examples from the left
Milo yianapolis - publisher canceled after the book had been printed but before release. Milo got to keep the advance.
Dr Seuss book - publisher pulled it from print
When Harry became Sally - Amazon banned it because it framed trans as a mental health issue. (as opposed to...?
Your turn, Robert.
John Henry
Of course, no one is talking about directly censoring “The Great Gatsby” or Henry James. In high schools and universities books simply disappear because they no longer appear in curricula or syllabi. For example, Henry James, except for easier works like “Daisy Miller,” is seldom taught in current literature courses. Challenging books like his “Portrait of a Lady” and “The Ambassadors” have disappeared
primarily because of their difficulty. “Gatsby,” on the other hand, has often been taught in China because of its critique of materialism, the excesses of capitalism and the American class system. It will survive here for the same reasons.
However, the recent trend of hiring diversity librarians in university and public libraries is particularly alarming . Their role is to subtly remove
“outdated books” and replace them with books that meet diversity, inclusion, and equity criteria. Diversity librarians have been given the power to decide which books are to be culled because they are outdated and thus expendable.
Anyone who doesn't realize that the left knows all this full well and wishes to go down this path regardless, well... let's just say they need to do some catching up
Henry James is unreadable, and citing him as one's favorite is a class signifier.
What books is she talking about? (are? both sound wrong) The story is paywalled and I don't know of any book banning in the US, so I can't judge the article on any level. There's informal woke cancelling of "wrong think" works, but that's not quite banning. What does she mean?
I'm all in if she's talking about all book banning. Including books that the woke left prahgrahsives think need to be removed. I wonder how she feels about banning certain kinds of speech? Or about banning people as well? Or certain kinds of information that don't follow a certain narrative?
Honestly, it's a small step from banning books to banning speech to banning people. You can arrive at that horrible end from a few different paths, but they all have the same ending. You are either free or you are not.
The left is treating America like a conquered people. It's not my observation, but it seems to me to have a lot of truth to it. Any leader who likes the lower classes as people is called a "fascist," the lower classes are "deplorable," or "unacceptable," and should stick to growing and delivering food, fuel, and finished goods to the cities, and don't get to uppity.
I got banned from r/censorship for arguing that they should rename the subreddit r/governmentcensorship. My posts about censorship kept getting censored because they weren’t the right kind of censorship.
Lem @ 12:17pm. Pretty hilarious.
Blogger rcocean said...
They're just removed from libraries, not allowed to be printed, and in some cases Amazon/BN/etc. won't sell them.
Who forbids printing? The dinosaur publishers? It is to laugh. Having self-published and published with a dinosaur publisher (CRC Press)I can't see why anybody but a very few authors would want a publisher anyway. To get your book into bookstores? Into libraries?
There are plenty of outfits that will provide all the services one needs to publish, distribute and promote a book. Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing is the biggest. I've used it for several paper & E books and am 100% satisfied.
They might refuse to publish a particular book, though I've not heard of that specifically. Amazon might refuse to carry the book in the bookstore. That eliminates an important distribution channel but it is hardly the only one.
People can make it difficult to publish but nobody can actually "ban" a book.
I suppose the government can, and may someday. But that day is not yet. I don't care what your book is, you can get it published and distributed.
John LGBTQBNY Henry
I'm not giving the Wapo any money. Was this guy teaching the girl as an elementary/middle schooler or as a college student. Books should not be banned from college students, very, very few might rate being banned from high school. But younger, the curious student should be able to get the books, but they should not be forced on them by supposed "educators".
"It seems that you don't really own the Ebook. You just lease it from Amazon."
That's not true but they do pull them up to the cloud if they've sat awhile. I would prefer to have all my books locally but I may be running out of space.
I have rented books in the past but that's a different matter. And they do go poof when the term is up.
Not to say that in some dystopian future Amazon wouldn't pull them all.
For that reason I keep an extra old reader with my earlier books disconnected from the net.
@ Wince at 9:38 AM
You nailed it!
Henry James is not unreadable, which is amazing considering the era he wrote in, but he is kind of an acquired taste and I think that the era of him being anybody's "favorite writer" is likely long past. Sometimes, reading these old books is more about anthropology than it is the delectation of written fiction as an art form, though.
Re: tim in vermont:
Henry James is not unreadable, which is amazing considering the era he wrote in
I don't know about that -- he's what, the last quarter of the 19th century, into the last years before the Great War? Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are contemporary with The Bostonians. And as you move later in James's career, into the Edwardian period, there's a lot of other contemporaries that are more of an easy-read and sound, as it were, more modern, at least to my ears. Sabine Baring-Gould, for example, or Saki (Hector Hugh Munro). Probably because they're a little more lowbrow.
I may have reported here previously that Mark Twain was asked to review a James book.
His pithy take: "Once I put it down, I couldn't pick it up."
Blogger Richard Dillman said...
Of course, no one is talking about directly censoring “The Great Gatsby” or Henry James. In high schools and universities books simply disappear because they no longer appear in curricula or syllabi. For example, Henry James, except for easier works like “Daisy Miller,” is seldom taught in current literature courses. Challenging books like his “Portrait of a Lady” and “The Ambassadors” have disappeared
primarily because of their difficulty. “Gatsby,” on the other hand, has often been taught in China because of its critique of materialism, the excesses of capitalism and the American class system. It will survive here for the same reasons.
However, the recent trend of hiring diversity librarians in university and public libraries is particularly alarming . Their role is to subtly remove
“outdated books” and replace them with books that meet diversity, inclusion, and equity criteria. Diversity librarians have been given the power to decide which books are to be culled because they are outdated and thus expendable.
Great Point! Removing the Classics is a much bigger problem that some religious nutters axing books who live in southern shithole Trumper counties. It's not like the next Einstein is coming from those backward petri dishes for inbreeding.
I've picked up a number of classics at my local public and University library's free pile. This is a real shame because it impacts actual smart kids who have real potential for making a difference in the world.
In July 2009, Amazon learned two of George Orwell’s e-books had been uploaded to its Kindle bookstore by a company that did not own rights to these books. Without notice, Amazon remotely deleted these books from users’ accounts and refunded the purchase price. Kindle users, however, likened Amazon’s actions to Amazon entering users’ homes, removing books from their bookshelves, and leaving a few dollars for compensation.
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Robert Cook said...
"Yes, but progs are a bit more subtle."
Don't be dishonest. The move to ban books in America is not just a recent phenomenon and it has come from all points of the political spectrum, (but more often, I suspect, from the right).
**************
Why not do a lot more "researching" to see if your suspicion is correct?
And, please, none of this "has come from" bullshit. We're talking about NOW.
While you're at it, tell us how many books Amazon tries to push out of sight, and where they lie on the political spectrum.
Or how the New York Times Book Review lauds lefty books and sneers at those written by conservatives.
Or how bookshops routinely "mis-place" conservative best-sellers on the Cookbooks and Fantasy shelves. (I've seen it happen numerous times.)
And just who is it who are Cancel Culture warriors?
henry james has a great literary style. His characters and stories of Upper class Americans and European Aristos are unpopular with many.
Teddy Roosevelt called him "a miserable little snob".
James calle TR the "the mere monsterous embroidement of unprecedented and resounding noise"
Poor Catherine Sloper! But Daisy Miller was a different order of female. Very good story. Who among those who've read it will ever see Italy in the same innocuous way as previously?
I am personally a Maisie fan.
Henry James rocks. Rocks!!
Sorry about Razieh. And think of all the unknown (to us) Raziehs. Sorry about Iran. Iran sucks. Sucks!!
Preventing pornography and graphic violence from being ingested by children is not censorship. I wish the Left would stop pretending it is.
---I've picked up a number of classics at my local public and University library's free pile. This is a real shame because it impacts actual smart kids who have real potential for making a difference in the world.
Howard! Yes, so true. The stuff they keep is current rubbish. The stuff they are dumping is the real deal.
But no one (much) reads it. And that is all they go by. They are not very imaginative, librarians. Once the thought that a special kid or a special adult might try that treasure was enough. But no more. Sign out the good books and keep them circulating.
---Sometimes, reading these old books is more about anthropology than it is the delectation of written fiction as an art form, though.
That is the statement of a total nitwit, Auntie Tim.
"That is the statement of a total nitwit, Auntie Tim"
Oh that hurts...
Azar Nasrifi blames America for an imagined act instead of blaming his own people for imprisoning and murdering young women. And if he is an American professor -- I too won't waste a penny on WaPo --we are paying him to commit this repulsive act of projection.
His university should censure him for lying about censorship. Bad intentions plus bald lies make bad teachers.
---Oh that hurts...
Not only are a lot of Henry James's books excellent reading, with great insights into his characters, but go back a generation or two earlier and Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories are superb, IMO, maybe the best ever written by an American.
Wince at 9:38 AM wrote:
"A book is not 'banned' simply because it is not made compulsory reading by a school's curriculum."
Several years back, when "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was dropped from required reading in a high school English class, Ken Kesey was asked for comment, and he was confident that Cuckoo's Nest was the kind of book that teenagers would always find somehow, read, and pass around to their friends. He thought high schools should teach Shakespeare, Dickens, Emerson, because it's important that they be taught.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Conversations_with_Ken_Kesey/kfgaBwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Ken+Kesey+%22great+authors%22&pg=PT192&printsec=frontcover
Prof. Nafisi is a she, Tina.
Dan Driscoll
I don't think there has been a book banned in the United States for more than 50 years.
I couldn't read behind the pay wall and assumed men and women didn't share prison spaces, Narr.
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