Against Censorship [from Len Gutkin in The Chronicle of Higher Ed]

We note the efforts of Len Gutkin, in The Chronicle Review, to push back against the worrisome censorship, self-censorship, and shaming on social media that have made it difficult for writers of all kinds, in all genres, from speaking out and expressing ideas that may go against the grain of contemporary orthodoxy. Here's a sample from his post dated July 12:

<<<

You Can’t Say That

Last month, the New York Post reported that Brandeis University’s Prevention, Advocacy, and Resource Center had published an “Oppressive Language List,” enumerating terms that one should strive to avoid. The list is real, and many of the suggestions seem quite reasonable, if rather obvious (ethnic slurs and so on). But others raised eyebrows. For instance, is the word “picnic” really associated with lynching? (No, as Reuters explains, and the word was eventually removed from the list.)

And what about phrases like “take a stab at,” “killing it,” and “take a shot at” — all rejected as “Violent Language” by Brandeis? Such prohibitions might seem to have less to do with ethics than with the metaphysical dream of a language free of all figuration. “Truth,” Nietzsche wrote, is a “mobile army of metaphors.” But “mobile army” sounds awfully violent. I suggest instead: “Truth is a roving ad hoc committee of administrators.”

&

• “I’m almost 60, and in these many decades I’ve seen people — some of them good friends — taken down by all kinds of things. Alcohol and drugs, mostly … You know what finally took me down? F—ing Twitter.” In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan on trying to shake an addiction. For more Twitter-skepticism, check out two Review articles: Justin E.H. Smith’s “How Social Media Imperils Scholarship” and Gordon Fraser’s “The Twitterization of the Academic Mind.”

• At Critical Inquiry, Frances Ferguson reviews The Teaching Archive, by Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan: “It is a history of literary study pitched against the accounts of literary professionalism that have given us the sense that we should guide our thinking about literature by doctrinal statements.” In the Review, Buurma and Heffernan previewed a portion of their argument.

• At the London Review of Books, Ange Mlinko writes, not entirely admiringly, about the poet Adrienne Rich: “You have to be accustomed to winning prizes, and quite certain of your place in the pecking order, to grandstand like this … One doesn’t read Rich for la comédie humaine, stylistic sprezzatura, or pleasure of any sort — unless one takes pleasure in moral indignation, which Lionel Trilling once claimed was a distinct feature of the American middle-class liberal.”

Write to me at: [email protected] or [email protected].

https://www.chronicle.com/newsletter/chronicle-review/2021-07-12

>>>

Len Gutkin

Len Gutkin is a senior editor at The Chronicle Review. His first book, Dandyism: Forming Fiction From Modernism to the Present, was published in February 2020 by the University of Virginia Press