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Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Bad?
See here: the ALA's 100 most frequently challenged books. Cujo makes the cut and The Tommyknockers doesn't? Where's the sense in that? (via Washington Monthly.)How many have you read? I score 30.
It seems to me actually rather heartening that only 6,000+ challenges were reported over a period of 10 years, even if the actual number is a couple orders of magnitude higher. That's not so many, when you consider the number of schools, libraries and cranky people out there. It is a bit surprising, actually, that no astroturf activist coalition of the excessively book-bothered is out there drumming up challenges on an industrial scale (knock on wood.)
The page seems not to provide data as to how many challenges were successful. Also, challenges to books on shelves are counted together with challenges to school curricula. The difference between objecting to kids being allowed to read x and being obliged to read x is potentially significant, to say the least.
And another thing. I just got around to reading several pieces from the latest PMLA (latest I've gotten in Singapore): March 2005, vol 120 no. 2.
Mostly harmless.
I'm thinking of doing a longer review, but first: what do people think of PMLA these days?
Here's another question I don't think think I've posed at the Valve. What academic lit and/or cultural studies journals are good and exciting, in your expert opinion? Justify your answer. What good articles of general interest have you read recently? I kick against the PMLA pricks, only to have people reassure me that's not where it's at. Well, where is? Since I'm planning to grump again, I wouldn't be averse to a mini-carnival of journalistic positivity beforehand.
Comments
One contributor has posted informal summaries and introductions to the contents of Social Text and NLH. That sort of thing should be undertaken by all relevant parties, one might think. Especially if one just read an issue, etc.
I’d be interested to hear more about how people interact with the latest issues of scholarly journals, because to be honest...I don’t. I read the book reviews, but unless the articles directly pertain to my dissertation or otherwise catch my eye (like Randall Knoper’s “American Literary Realism and Nervous ‘Reflexion’” in American Literature a few years back), I shelve them for some future time when my current research doesn’t occupy 99% of my journal reading time. Is this prioritization simply a dissertation phenonema?
Where’s Waldo? WTF?
It would be interesting to survey the ALA list to see who objected to each book, and why. Some, for instance, To Kill a Mockingbird, were protested both by progressives and by conservatives.
Where’s Waldo is on the list because one of its pages supposedly depicts, in the crowd, a woman lying on the beach who has undone her bikini top and then looked up at something.
As Billmon says, sometimes it appears that reality has been subcontracted out to a writing team of Twain and Kafka.