Uploaded July 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
Lecture at the conference "Courage and Convictions. Practicing Judgment", June 27, 2025
Recently government agencies in the United States are removing and/or banning books from public schools and libraries. Progressive critics have also called for some books to be culled from reading lists. Given the special status and legal protection of free speech in the United States, how do we make sense of these restrictions from the right and the left? Is this a continuation of the culture and canon wars from the 1990s, when conservatives censored works they called obscene, and progressives replaced mainstream authors with marginalized voices? This talk proposes that what is being adjudicated and suppressed in these cases is literature itself, rather than specific authors or works.
Lecture at the conference "Courage and Convictions. Practicing Judgment", June 27, 2025
Recently government agencies in the United States are removing and/or banning books from public schools and libraries. Progressive critics have also called for some books to be culled from reading lists. Given the special status and legal protection of free speech in the United States, how do we make sense of these restrictions from the right and the left? Is this a continuation of the culture and canon wars from the 1990s, when conservatives censored works they called obscene, and progressives replaced mainstream authors with marginalized voices? This talk proposes that what is being adjudicated and suppressed in these cases is literature itself, rather than specific authors or works.
