September 25-October 2 is “banned books” week in the United states. In an article on the NYT Paper Cuts blog, Lela Moore speaks of recent attempts to ban Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, the story of a high school girl who is raped and then ostracized because of rumors about the incident. In such cases Twitter is increasingly being used as a vehicle for opposition. Writes Moore, “Twitter has become, as Anderson told me in an interview, a ‘game changer’ in public discourse” (Moore, 2010, September 28).
While Life of Pi has to the best of my knowledge not yet been formally challenged, it seems the sort of book that might eventually draw the attention of censors on the grounds of its religious content and some depictions of violence. How would you defend this book, or any other book, from potential censorship were it challenged in your classroom? How do we determine whether a book is “appropriate” for young adults and what are the inherent challenges in attempting to do so?
References and relevant links:
Moore, Lela. (2010, September 28). “Twitter: Banned Books’ New Best Friend.” NYT Paper Cuts. Available:
http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/twitter-banned-books-new-best-friend/?partner=rss&emc=rss
Banned Books Week Website: http://www.bannedbooksweek.org/
I want to make a short reflexion about the censorship because it really surprised me the exposition and acceptance of this issue. In the banned book week, it is published a list with the books that have been banned in all US. On the contrary, in my country, the censorship it is a theme that nobody talks about, but it is always there. And generally, the censorship is implicit: there are no lists so you have to assume a lot of things and you can never talk openly about them.
In most cases, when a school bans a text, it do it because its members have a common system of values. They share the same social and moral values. This is a typical behavior in a endogamic community.
Usually this is accompanied by an extremely rigid teaching methodology which generates in the students a rigid way of thinking. Therefore, they do not question the moral-value system and become objects of an ideology. For example, in Chile, the most radical and conservative catholic groups are, at the same time, the first defenders of the liberal capitalist system and one of the most classist minority.
This would not happen if the educational system created critical subjects who were able to make informed decisions. In other words, subjects of ideology: people who use and practices consciously and partially an ideology.
From this point of view, a book as Life of Pi, that did not close itself to only one interpretation either to a meaning, gives the reader more responsibility and power. Therefore, it contributes to the generation of a critical reader. In Barthes’ words: What evaluation finds is precisely this value: what can be written (re-wrtitten) today: the scriptible. Why is scriptible our value? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of a text. [S/Z: 3]
If we think our students as readers, and readers as producers of meanings we can avoid censorship of Pi and other texts which pedagogical function is more important than the naive defense of a specific system of values. In other words, the main value in the educational system would be critical thinking in order to enable the existence of critical and reflexive students.