ENGL 430: Censored and Canceled Literature

Course Description

This course analyzes the reasons and ramifications for literary texts that have, at one time or another, been censored throughout literary history. We will try to understand what some readers found threatening about each text during its historical moment. It is subsequently an examination of the functions that writers in English have assigned to literary decadence, libertinism, and aestheticism (or, the study of beauty and "art for art's sake"). We will read writers who identified themselves as libertines as well as writers who represented libertines as we address the Restoration rake (Rochester & Behn), the Regency buck (the Shelleys & DeQuincey), the Victorian dandy, the modern playboy (Nin, Waugh & Fitzgerald), hippie-swinger (Wolfe & Jagger), and finally, the postmodern player-celebrity (Bret Easton Ellis & rock-lyricists).
This course analyzes the reasons and ramifications for literary texts that have, at one time or another, been censored throughout literary history. We will try to understand what some readers found threatening about each text during its historical moment.