BANNED BOOKS

Censorship is nothing new; books have been banned, burned, and bowdlerized for generations. In this course, students study some of those books and work toward an understanding of what lies beneath the impulse to censor. Are some ideas simply so unpleasant that they need to be kept from the citizenry? Students read texts that have been banned for political or religious reasons, texts that have faced obscenity charges, and texts that have been challenged as inappropriate for schools and public libraries. The overarching concern is to contemplate what place censorship has in a free society.