Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 6 - February 12, 2025
Within this particular worldview, it is easy to see why challengers are arguing that children should not read a particular book because reading is a powerful act—one that has effects on individual character and behavior.
Like reading a sacred text
These acts of writing had and have actual ramifications in the “real world.”
Birth, death, graduation
As demonstrated in the analysis chapters that follow, challengers are finely attuned to the legitimating power of writing and its influence over people in the sense that this power can validate the assumption presented in a particular text.
A common theme in challengers’ discourse centers on whether or not the presence of a controversial idea in a book gives legitimacy to the idea as such.
schools. If such books are present it means that, for the challengers, the institutions approve of all aspects of the texts within.
For challengers, having a book in a public or school library collection, and especially if the book is approved for use in a school curriculum, means that the institution believes in the ideas that are presented in the text.
Challengers, like almost all contemporary readers, take this idea of fixity of the text as a given and assume that the text they are challenging is the same for all.
First, that scripture itself is a fixed entity but its new status as simply “a book” means that it has lost some of its sacred character. Second and concurrently, that sacred meaning is inextricable from the materiality of the text.[24]
As demonstrated in the analysis chapters, challengers often fear that reading the targeted texts will not only lead to short-term harmful effects but also puts the reader’s soul in jeopardy.
Social framing constructs certain materials as being “worth reading” and is a socially defined concept.
As Fish explains, the meaning of a text is never fixed and is open to polysemy (i.e., multiple meanings) across time, groups of people, or even within a single individual.
As will be shown in the analysis chapters, challengers, in fact, disagree with this view of texts being open to many different meanings and often argue that there is only one possible interpretation of the texts that they target.
Christianity is a religion whose doctrines are based almost exclusively on texts.
For the Christian, almost everything that one needed to know for salvation was contained in these texts and he or she considered reading to be the path to redemption. As will be demonstrated in the analysis chapters, the negative of this idea (that reading can be a pathway to sin) is a common theme in challengers’ discourse.
According to M. B. Parkes, there were four levels of interpretation that readers used when studying texts. The first was lectio, in which the student had to identify the elements of the text. Emendatio referred to the corrections made by the student to the manuscript text. The third, enarratio, described the process of interpreting the text’s subject matter. Finally, iudicium referred to judgment of the aesthetic qualities of the
People also continued to read aloud publicly—a practice that dated from antiquity.[33]
Saenger notes that the connection between silent reading and accusations of heresy began in the 11th century.
Alone in his study, the author, whether a well-known professor or an obscure student, could compose or read heterodox ideas without being overheard.
Private visual reading and composition thus encouraged individual critical thinking and contributed ultimately to the development of skepticism and intellectual heresy.[34]
Sacred and classical works usually included annotations, glosses, and commentaries that would guide the reader toward a “correct” interpretation of the original text.
Like conf talks
When one considers the doctrine of sola scriptura, it is not surprising, then, that Protestant reformers viewed the practice of reading with some trepidation.
Although the segments of society who are not trusted to have adequate interpretive skills have changed over time, this study demonstrates that the fear of unmediated interpretation is paramount to understanding why people challenge materials in public institutions.
How this happened and the nuances of this change remain highly contested among scholars.
However, reading fever for texts other than the Bible grew in the antebellum period, and the reading public in the United States became especially enamored of novels, which “threatened not just to coexist with elite literature but to replace it.”[46]
Intensive reading, a style that characterized many readers up to this point, involved reading a few items closely, while extensive reading describes reading many items with less care.
As will be demonstrated in chapter 4, this scene illustrates a particular fear that is common in the discourse of challengers wherein they are afraid that other parents are not “living up to their jobs” by setting proper boundaries for their children. The
This is a conceptualization of readers that defines many interpretive communities throughout the West today and it is an interpretive strategy that many librarians, administrators, and other staff of public libraries and schools share.
Their discourse concerning interpretive strategies of text is grounded in a particular understanding of how one views text, wherein “rational thought” is coupled with a view of “common sense” that elevates a monosemic rather than a polysemic interpretation of text.
Mark Noll argues that Common Sense philosophy provided a necessary epistemological framework for the Revolution era.[54]
Previous eras including the Reformation, Puritanism of the 17th century, and the First Great Awakening of the 18th century “stressed human disability as much as human capability, noetic deficiency as much as epistemic capacity, and historical realism as much as social optimism.”[55]
This orientation toward the scientific, especially in the realm of the interpretation of texts, is explained in more detail by George Marsden in his writings on fundamentalism and evangelicalism in the United States.[56]
This foundation in Common Sense philosophy means that the idea of critical distance has a slightly different implication in this context.
However, as many of the books that are the targets of challengers do not contain illustration, challengers are more often concerned with mental images that are conjured by the text on the page.
That is, challengers conceptualize imagining as a mimetic experience where, through reading a text, the reader experiences the actions in the text. Since
about a particular event is akin to livi...
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Teachers at the Ivy League colleges in the 18th century passed on to their students “an implicit suspicion of the undisciplined imagination, a conviction that literature must serve clear social needs, and a pervasive assumption that social need and social order were one and the same. Through these students—many of whom served as ministers—these ideas were readily disseminated throughout the populace.”[59]
These concepts of commonsense interpretive strategies and fear of the undisciplined imagination are an important aspect of the worldview of challengers and are key to understanding the knowledge side of the censorship equation.
Lyons, History of Reading and Writing.
Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Although books by people of color have slowly been included in the canon, the lists included works that were not previously part of elementary and secondary school curricula in the United States.
Passing by Nella Larsen—was
Read
The coincidence of timing (Banned Books Week would begin on September 22) along with the reputation of Invisible Man as a classic work of American
According to the American Prospect, Pope’s agenda was well known in North Carolina: “scale back taxes, take away the social safety net, and reverse focus on public schools.”[7]
Following the completion of the 2010 census, the legislature also oversaw a redistricting process that placed all Democrats in the state into three (out of a total 13) congressional districts. In the midst of all these policy changes, Art Pope became cocounsel to the state legislature.
Gerry
The reactionary policy changes in response to shifts in the population in North Carolina can be found throughout
How does this compare to Idaho? Are changes real, or perceived?
so-called culture wars
Dont like the so called modifier
Book challenge cases, similar to other events of local politics, are the embodiment of community control over public institutions.
The use of the term “innocent” is telling here and seems to indicate that the author had an underhanded purpose for telling his story.
As will be discussed in the following chapters, challengers often discuss reading as a mimetic and embodied practice. That is, when people read a text, they actually experience events along with the narrator.
This book should not be on the summer reading list, especially when [you] know that most parents would not review this book first, before handing it over to their 15–16 year old child. . . . This book is freely in your library for them to read. And clearly, no one truly read through this book before they allowed it to be [placed] where young teenagers could freely check it out of your library. (Request for reconsideration, Randleman, NC, July 30, 2013)
