Undergraduate Courses
Rhetoric
156: Rhetoric of the Political Novel
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ScheduledFall 2011 Instructor(s)
Michael MascuchSpring 2013 Instructor(s)
Ramona Naddaff
This course focuses on the censorship of a series of nineteenth-and twentieth-century novels: Madame Bovary, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Slaughterhouse Five, and The Satanic Verses. In reading and analyzing these novels, we will study the legal trials and bans that interpret these fictions as obscene, vulgar and illiterate, racist, unpatriotic, immoral and blasphemous. Our goal will be two-fold. First, we will consider both the repressive and productive mechanisms of literary censorship and its effects on the novel’s composition, editing, publication, public reception and readership. Second, we will take into account the specific political, historical and legal circumstances provoking literary censorship trials as well as the various and oftentimes opposing rhetorical interpretations promoted during and in their wake. This course is organized broadly around four themes: Origins: Images and Music of Death and Desire; Marriage, Eros and Obscenity; Young Audiences: Education, Patriotism and Racism; Religion, Politics, Blasphemy and Violence.
Required Reading
1. Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
2. D.H. Lawrence: Lady Chatterley’s Lover
3. Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
4. Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses
5. Anonymous, Go Ask Alice
6. K. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five