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Book Banning in 21st-Century America (Paperback)
Loot Price: R884
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Book Banning in 21st-Century America (Paperback)
Series: Beta Phi Mu Scholars Series
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Requests for the removal, relocation, and restriction of books-also
known as challenges-occur with some frequency in the United States.
Book Banning in 21st-Century American Libraries, based on thirteen
contemporary book challenge cases in schools and public libraries
across the United States argues that understanding contemporary
reading practices, especially interpretive strategies, is vital to
understanding why people attempt to censor books in schools and
public libraries. Previous research on censorship tends to focus on
legal frameworks centered on Supreme Court cases, historical case
studies, and bibliographies of texts that are targeted for removal
or relocation and is often concerned with how censorship occurs.
The current project, on the other hand, is focused on the why of
censorship and posits that many censorship behaviors and practices,
such as challenging books, are intimately tied to the how one
understands the practice of reading and its effects on character
development and behavior. It discusses reading as a social practice
that has changed over time and encompasses different physical
modalities and interpretive strategies. In order to understand why
people challenge books, it presents a model of how the practice of
reading is understood by challengers including "what it means" to
read a text, and especially how one constructs the idea of
"appropriate" reading materials. The book is based on three
different kinds sources. The first consists of documents including
requests for reconsideration and letters, obtained via Freedom of
Information Act requests to governing bodies, produced in the
course of challenge cases. Recordings of book challenge public
hearings constitute the second source of data. Finally, the third
source of data is interviews with challengers themselves. The book
offers a model of the reading practices of challengers. It
demonstrates that challengers are particularly influenced by what
might be called a literal "common sense" orientation to text
wherein there is little room for polysemic interpretation (multiple
meanings for text). That is, the meaning of texts is always clear
and there is only one avenue for interpretation. This common sense
interpretive strategy is coupled with what Cathy Davidson calls
"undisciplined imagination" wherein the reader is unable to
maintain distance between the events in a text and his or her own
response. These reading practices broaden our understanding of why
people attempt to censor books in public institutions.
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