Posted on 01/22/2022 7:51:16 PM PST by algore
As one of the greatest works in Britain’s literary canon, Nineteen Eighty-Four sounds a chilling warning about the dangers of censorship.
Now staff at the University of Northampton have issued a trigger warning for George Orwell’s novel on the grounds that it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’.
The advice, revealed following a Freedom of Information request by The Mail on Sunday, has infuriated critics, who say it runs contrary to the themes in the book.
Published in 1949, Orwell’s dystopian story – set in a totalitarian state which persecutes individual thinking – gave the world phrases such as ‘Big Brother’, ‘Newspeak’ and ‘thought police’.
Its plot centres on Winston Smith, a government employee who is arrested and tortured over an illicit love affair, but it also makes powerful points about what can happen to a society that doesn’t cherish academic freedoms or its own history.
Yet it is one of several literary works which have been flagged up to students at Northampton who are studying a module called Identity Under Construction. They are warned that the module ‘addresses challenging issues related to violence, gender, sexuality, class, race, abuses, sexual abuse, political ideas and offensive language’.
In addition to Orwell’s book, academics identify several works in the module that have the potential to be ‘offensive and upsetting’ including the Samuel Beckett play Endgame, the graphic novel V For Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd and Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing The Cherry.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Offensive and upsetting????
Most of them (and the politicians they support) are using it as an instruction manual, not a cautionary tale.
in an effort to persecute and stifle individual thinking, a university decries orwell’s story about the persecution of individual thinking
Revealed: George Orwell died after catching the Tuberculosis from a grubby hospital while recovering from being shot by a sniper in the Spanish Civil War.
How George Orwell contracted the disease that killed him has been a mystery
Bacteria tests suggest that he caught TB while recovering from a bullet wound
Orwell was shot in the neck during the Spanish Civil War on May 20, 1937
He died in 1950, a year after his most well-known novel, 1984, was published
He described being shot as ‘the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion’
George Orwell is known best for his dystopian novel 1984, that was published shortly before he died.
But while it was known that tuberculosis was the cause of his death, little is understood about how he contracted the deadly condition, given he suffered a lung condition as a child.
Now, after pioneering research, it is suspected he caught the disease in hospital while recovering from a gun shot from fighting in the Spanish Civil War.
Continued...
You know what triggers me? When they actually do the stuff in the book!
Trigger warnings on literature are becoming as common as California Proposition 65 warning labels. Is there any literature that won’t trigger someone?
What a loon host Will Forte is. Keeps mocking anti-vaxx people in MacGrubber sketches. Can’t hear him through mask at the end of the show. MacLooney! Hope and prays he never suffers a vaccine side effect. If he does he will probably from his couch keep desperately searching for information by switching between NBC, MSNBC and CNN.
“In other words, the University doesn’t want the students to read it, and find out they are Communists.”
Exactamundo!
It’s a book of prophecy.
What’s the big deal?
I disagree. Today, young people are most likely to demand trigger warnings.
For the first time in U.S. history, a majority of young people want greater restrictions on free speech.
fkn pussies. meow.
the irony is extremely thick
there was no comedy
I might agree. Y’know, if those morons would respond to my objections to loud, obscenity-laced, violence-infested, mindless noise called rap and hip-hop played in autos at 90 kajillion decibels that drive by by banning it and jailing those who make it.
Its a horse!
Babylon Bee? That’s what I thought when I read the headline.
Ok....I will now read the article that is **not** from the Babylon Bee.
***contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’.***
What a snowflake and pansy world we live in today! I read both 1984 and BRAVE NEW WORLD back when I was a young teen aged 15-17 in 1962-1964. (unexpurgated versions at that!)
Betcha there is a book store not far from campus that sells worse books, magazines and latex goods that would be labeled PORN.
F’n left really love censorship.
Read 1984 and Animal Farm back in HS.
Of course!
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