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Post by beth on Oct 1, 2010 23:17:09 GMT -5
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aubrey
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Post by aubrey on Oct 2, 2010 6:12:21 GMT -5
Bizarre, isn't it?
When the film of The wizard of Oz was on show and a bit hit all over America, the book was banned from many school libraries, I think because it was fantasy.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Oct 2, 2010 14:37:01 GMT -5
I can understand 'Justine' being banned. Some of the others I don't know but quite a few of them have been suppressed for purely political reasons.
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aubrey
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Post by aubrey on Oct 2, 2010 16:34:00 GMT -5
Justine is still only words - 26 letters in various groupings.
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Erasmus
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Post by Erasmus on Oct 2, 2010 19:17:09 GMT -5
The Irish propensity for banning books has led to a strange position. There's a whole lot of books from before censorship was lifted that just aren't available even in the central library (which isn't up to much anyway). They weren't significant enough to be worth procuring copies from the 1990s on, which makes library membership sometimes horribly frustrating. Banned classics are available, but not quite ordinary novels that fell foul of the censor at the time.
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Post by beth on Oct 2, 2010 20:25:17 GMT -5
Some for political reasons, yes. Some for religious reasons, true. Many because of sexual content the banners found offensive. I answered the questions at the link and the books they offered me included: 1984 - George Orwell Animal Farm - George Orwell A Light in the Attic - Shel Silverstein To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut Justine - Marquis de Sade Candide - Voltaire Brave New World - Aldous Huxley A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Marki Twain Naked Lunch - William S. Burroughs Quite a mix, I think. Eclectic, even.
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Erasmus
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Post by Erasmus on Oct 3, 2010 18:32:30 GMT -5
Huckleberry Finn is a particular case in point where opposites tend to agree, to everybody's deficit. By modern standards Mark Twain was probably racist. He would most likely have believed in segregated equality an innate cultural difference - in other words for his time a dangerous, even radical, liberal.
But he uses A Word that has been deemed unacceptabl. Never mind that it was acceptable and that its unacceptablility is nothing to do with the word itself but with the prejudice it represents; the fact of using it renders the entire work unacceptable, even though it shows just the opposite sentiments.
This sort of reflex objection is everything the racists want. If you can only show black slavery in terms of everybody sympathetic and polite to these people who just happen to be of a lower social (but no other) order, how can you show anything wrong with it?
The same has come up in relation to Nazism. I think Schindler's List even faced some problems with it. How do you show anything wrong with Nazism if you cannot repeat the language Nazis used against Jews and Blacks and Gypsies among others?
Likewise, it still arouses some controversy to admit that there were good Nazis - people who believed in their Brave New World and saw it working, who did not necessarily buy into the racism or the militarism but convinced themselves that these were insignificant side-issues or mistakes and genuinely were horrified to be brought out of their trance to see what they had been endorsing. Germans, especially Lutheran North Germans, far more than Bavarians and Austrians.
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Post by beth on Oct 3, 2010 19:55:48 GMT -5
Great post, Erasmus! Ping! Of course, Clemens was probably a racist by current standards, but in his time, that general attitude was accepted as the norm .. perhaps not everywhere, but here and there throughout this country. To Kill a Mockingbird has been harshly criticized for carving a story from this same social atmosphere - especially in the deep south. Should books, not PC in context, be banned or re-written? Of course not. That's as ridiculous as the Texas attempt to revise school books to change the facts of the crusades in order to put a prettier face on Christianity. I think we have to stand up and claim our past ... disturbing as it may be. Shake hands with it, learn from it and move on.
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Erasmus
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Post by Erasmus on Oct 3, 2010 21:04:42 GMT -5
It is important that books should not be judged on language alone, but on sentiment, and those with unacceptable sentiment judged for that, not for any language they might express.
I remember my Latin/Greek master once turning to ask me "Do you think Terence was a nigger?" To him, it was the perfectly normal appellation for Africans with none of the prejudice that Americans have forced upon us. Furthermore, the full name of Terence was Publius Terentius Afer and we know he was captured as a slave in Carthage but made good. We do not know whether he grew up there or moved there, though it's a bit odd the assumption that his family was Greek going to an African colony of what the Bible calls Philistines.
All the same, the nickname Afer could apply to [north] Africans or to the Berbers under Punic domination, or mean 'Ape'. There's no record of Romans ever calling black Africans Apes though they weren't too sure where human left off and sub-human began, but that's true of 'Germans' too. But the Sahara was a bigger barrier then than the Mediterranean so there's not much chance he was a nigger. Romans never mentioned any racial characteristics of the North Africans they worked with, but there is no suggestion that marrying the last incestuous Cleopatra's daughters off to African kings of Numidia and Mauretania was anything peculiar.
But you go by what the words mean to the speaker, not to somebody else's determination to find fault. It is almost certain that Christian started as a term of contempt for deviant half-Jews. It isn't that now.
But how are we to understand the prejudice if we are not allowed to wince at it? You can understand suppressing To kill a Mocking Bird for the exact reasons that the story cannot accept a white woman seducing a black man (and some feminists today cannot accept women as sexually active human beings equal to or controlling men). What is purest poison is when supposedly liberal forces are manipulated to support exactly the same suppression, so ultimately support the racists, because the words used by offensive people with offensive attitudes offend them!
But we can do it sexually! We are all too happy to follow traditional presentation of women as feeble victims of dominating male sexual interest they do not want with depiction of girls as feeble victims of dominating male sexual interest they do not want and prefer each other for life instead of finding men they can relate to in the same way as to each other - in other words, the same old traditional insistance that females can't relate to men as equals, whether that is fighting Sir Jasper off or glorifying that oranges actually are the only fruit because they don't want difference.
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Post by mouse on Oct 4, 2010 3:50:11 GMT -5
if we do not look at the unaltered truth of the past...we have no mesure by which to improve the present or the future
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Erasmus
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Post by Erasmus on Oct 4, 2010 6:33:24 GMT -5
Merchant of Venice is a case in point. It seems to repeat a lot of commonly believed prejudices about Jews - and why shouldn't it since Shakespeare was part of the culture and probably believed them too - but they are missed because they have long since been forgotten. Another dubious one is Chaucer's The Knight's Tale. It seems as if most of the Crusader battles that the Knight is proud of participating in were outright massacres. So is Chaucer mocking him or accepting Crusades don't come under the same rules as war with Catholics (considering that Eastern denominations fell foul of the Crusaders as well).
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