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 ...
In other words, the University doesn’t want the students to read it, and find out they are Communists.
Too close to today’s reality, eh?
what could be more 1984 than that?
...while others just call it....truth.
Someone should slip a copy of “Johnny Tremain” into that library.
That the Orwell Free Speech Award will only go to "woke" authors.
This is not a joke.
Happened less then a year ago.
Good gosh. That is “fall on the head with a grand piano from five stories up” kind of irony.
Yet doesn’t leave a scratch on them.
The power of delusion is strong in them.
‘We are aware some texts might be challenging for some students and have accounted for this when developing our courses.’
Earlier this month, The Mail on Sunday reported how Salford University students have been given a ‘trigger warning’ over Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations.
English literature undergraduates are warned of ‘scenes and discussions of violence and sexual violence in several of the primary texts’ that they may find ‘distressing’.
You couldn’t make that photo up if you tried.
How... Orwellian...
On the otherhand, middle schools and high schools have been using “Banned books” displays to entice kids into reading objectionable materials.
This could backfire. It could make students curious.
It’s critical of communism which is worse than pornography to the average liberal.
Make Orwell Fiction Again!
Slapping a ‘trigger warning’ on a book seems like the best way to get young people interested in it.
Snowflakes...
Middle school and high school students are given books portraying man/boy explicit sex, pictures of sex acts and male female sex and the schools are lying to parents. The public schools are corrupt and dangerous.
Whether by design, or by incompetence
Whatever makes you feel better
I find the word “trigger” to be used by the slang version of a cat.
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