Scandal and Censorship

Dear Colleagues,

The study of scandal and the study of censorship face comparable problems: both scandal and censorship appear determined by their cultural and historical contexts to the point that generalizing claims about the structural functioning of literary scandal and the censorship of literature across history seem difficult to sustain. At the same time, both scandal and censorship have transhistorical features that should reward comparative analyses and, throughout history, scandal and censorship appear imbricated in a near-symbiotic relationship, albeit with antithetical cultural effects: while scandals are noisy cultural events that draw attention to their dissident credentials, censorship aims at silencing dissent and distracting the very attention scandal aims to elicit. Yet, as the facetiously named ‘Streisand effect’ makes clear, censorship does not necessarily stifle, but sometimes even kindles the flame scandal has lit.

While censorship is prescriptive and penalizing, scandal baulks at prescription and—in the case of avantgarde culture, for instance—attempts to throw esthetic, moral, and social directives to the winds. The relationship between scandal and censorship is also characterized by a spiral of escalation, since widespread freedom of expression makes the scandalization of a public less likely so that the weakening of censorship as a mechanism of state control seems to correlate with a necessity for scandals to become more provocative and violent to yield shock effects where intended. The dynamics of scandal and censorship can be seen on an even more fundamental level: if the very rules of literary discourse have been shaped by the presence of censorship, as Annabel Patterson has so influentially suggested in Censorship and Interpretation (1984), then the transgressions inscribed in scandalizing literature are inevitably shaped by their engagement with literary censorship past or present.

This Special Issue of Humanities is dedicated to scandal and the censorship of literature in and/or from the Anglophone world. We invite contributors to engage with any of the following questions raised by the conceptual configuration of scandal and censorship from both historical and/or systematic perspectives:

• Is there a logical or even inevitable nexus between scandal and censorship?
• Are the crosscurrents of scandal and censorship always historically and/or culturally determined?
• Does literature’s scandalous impact lead to censorship, or does the censorious repression of writing lead to a scandalized response?
• Is scandal accidental, strategic, or contingent with censorship, and how does the threat of censorship affect the esthetic features of scandalizing work?
• Does an anxiety about scandal result in writerly self-censorship (through omission, evasion, veiling) or strategic coding (as irony, satire, or allegory)?
• How does the context of censorship affect the ‘scandal sensitivity’ of a piece of writing?
• Do literary scandals provide a reformist impulse within society by urging a loosening of repressive control or do they result in a tightening of censorious restrictions?

Prof. Dr. Stephan Karschay
Dr. Franziska Quabeck
Guest Editors

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• scandal
• censorship
• dissent
• silence
• articulation
• circulation
• power
• discourse
• resonance
• deviance
• normativity
• transgression
• private
• public
• press
• literature
• law
• book bans