End of Semester Review, ENGL 2000, Banned Books
What have we learned?
- The period goes inside the closed quotation mark unless there’s a citation–the source is part of the sentence
- Signposting–letting your reader know where you’re going–is important
- People have been banning books as long as there have been books
- Americans have been banning books since before America existed
- Attempts to ban books have skyrocketed since COVID
- Getting to the end of a novel doesn’t just let you know what happens, it lets you look back and think about what it all adds up to, what it meant that things happened the way they did
- The feeling when you are on the way there and looking forward to that act of looking back is called the anticipation of retrospection
- In retrospect, this time will appear in histories of the US as a time when the country lost the plot, when it couldn’t see where it was going
- Many of the people challenging books are also anti-vaxx, -mask, -school closures, and -transgender
- Literature lets us see the world through others’ eyes
- Meanness is a powerful force
- Kindness seems like weakness to some, strength to others
- We revise so we can improve
- Peer review allows you to see things through another set of eyes, showing you errors and possibilities that you couldn’t see yourself
- There is more value to a group of people spending fifty minutes together three times a week to talk about books than most people understand
- You write daily reading responses so you know what you think and can share it
- What we think together matters
- Ostranenie or defamiliarization is what the Russian formalists say defines literature–it’s writing that makes the world strange in order that readers might see the world anew
- Many attempts to remove books from schools and libraries are motivated by something other than is claimed
- Around a third of challenged books are about people of color and LGBTQ people
- American history is the history of some people being cruel and encouraging cruelty and of other people trying to make us kinder
- The supermajority of the state legislature would rather we didn’t talk about this
- The President-Elect has it in for the Department of Education
- Gather support; quote and paraphrase and integrate; cite your sources
- Some sources of cruelty: not being able to see outside ourselves, not being able to see people as people
- Some sources of kindness: being open to thinking about something other than ourselves, to learning, to being taught
- If you read something and learn from it, cite it: it taught you something, and that needs to be recognized
This will all be on the test.
Samuel Cohen 