During the last obscenity trial involving a text-only medium in the United States, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that William Burrough’s novel Naked Lunch (1959) was “not obscene.” This ruling, which in a sense declared the novel to be a legally dead medium incapable of arousing revolutionary transformation, is at odds with the book censorship craze that animates contemporary right-wing ideology in the United States. The legal-instituional regulation of access to works of fiction (and nonfiction) that transgress conservative forms of life suggests that literature, far from being legally dead, is vibrantly alive as a source of alternative imagining.

The attempted restriction of reading subjects’ access to imaginary lifeworlds is a staple of right-wing politics in North America, but it has also been a timeworn political tactic exercised by other authoritarian regimes across the globe. And so, while this seminar has been conceived within the context of the American right’s ongoing effort to control access to literature, "Book Censorship and the Politics of Literature" probes beyond the (often exceptionalizing) horizon of US literary culture. Towards that end, the seminar invites papers that expand the critical, historical, and geographical horizon with which the management of literature is assessed and critiqued. By conceiving of book censorship as a universalizable assault on people’s ability to imagine ways of living that resist endemic socio-political structures (capital’s global flow, far-right fascism, heteronormativity, the decline of collectivism, etc.), the seminar wants to highlight the various affordances of reading and producing literature, as well as how works of fiction are constrained by, reflect, and resist their legal and institutional management.


Topics of interest could include (but are not limited to!):

• Where and how do literary concepts such as form, narrative, and aesthetics fit into critical debates about the political and institutional management of literature?


• The affects of censorship


• Historical perspectives on twenty first century book censorship


• Book censorship and authoritarianism


• The political stakes of reading and/or writing


• Judgment (both legal and/or aesthetic)


• The socio-institutional location(s) of reading and/or writing


• Geographies of book censorship