US students request 'trigger warnings' on literature

[no-body]

US students request 'trigger warnings' on literature | Books | theguardian.com

books containing scenes with potential to cause distress said to include Things Fall Apart, The Great Gatsby and Mrs Dalloway

Students in America have been asking for "trigger warnings" to be included on works of literature which deal with topics such as rape or war.

The request was formally made by the student government at the University of California in Santa Barbara, according to the New York Times, which yesterday also cited similar requests from students at Oberlin College, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, George Washington University and other places.

Books which have been named by students as potentially requiring "trigger warnings" – the term is used to warn readers of possibly distressing material to follow – include Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald, Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and The Merchant of Venice. A draft trigger warning policy from Oberlin, quoted in Inside Higher Education, used Achebe's acclaimed text as an example of a work which might require a warning, saying the novel was "a triumph of literature that everyone in the world should read. However, it may trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide, and more."

"The examination of suicidal tendencies in Mrs Dalloway may trigger painful memories for students suffering from self-harm," wrote one student at Rutgers, before suggesting that "reaching a compromise between protecting students and defending their civil liberties is imperative to fulfilling the educational potential of our university's undergraduates", and that this could be done through the use of trigger warnings, so that the plot of a story is not spoiled, but that students can "immediately learn whether courses will discuss traumatic content".

"For instance, one trigger warning for The Great Gatsby might be: (TW: "suicide," "domestic abuse" and "graphic violence")," he wrote. "Professors can also dissect a narrative's passage, warning their students which sections or volumes of a book possess triggering material and which are safer to read. This allows students to tackle passages that are not triggering but return to triggering passages when they are fully comfortable."

A student at Santa Barbara told the New York Times that she was moved to suggest implementing trigger warnings after being shown a graphic film containing rape during class. She told the paper she was a victim of sexual abuse herself, and that "people suddenly feel a very real threat to their safety – even if it is perceived. They are stuck in a classroom where they can't get out, or if they do try to leave, it is suddenly going to be very public."

As criticism swirled around the concept of trigger warnings for university literature courses – one professor told the New York Times that "the presumption there is that students should not be forced to deal with something that makes them uncomfortable is absurd or even dangerous" – Meredith Raimondo, Oberlin's associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said that providing warnings was "responsible pedagogical practice", and that she objected to "the argument of 'Kids today need to toughen up'". "That absolutely misses the reality that we're dealing with. We have students coming to us with serious issues, and we need to deal with that respectfully and seriously," Raimondo told the US paper.

In the UK, professor of English at University College London John Mullan said the issue had "never come up, as far as I know".

"I think academics talk quite a lot about how particular literary texts might play to or provoke particular sensitivities – we do talk about that privately. But once we have taken the decision about courses and reading lists, we do not put health warnings on. Essentially literature is full of every kind of upsetting, provoking, awkward-making, saddening, embarrassing stuff you could ever think of. That's what it is like. [And] the time you would start labelling it with warnings – it seems to me that that way madness lies," said Mullan.

"What do you decide is upsetting, and what actions does it leave you open to [if you get it wrong]? It's treating people as if they are babies, and studying literature is for grownups at university. You might as well put a label on English literature saying: warning – bad stuff happens here."

 

[no-body]

I'm a bleeding heart liberal but this **** is ridiculous.

 

[Iti oj]

I'm a bleeding heart liberal but this **** is ridiculous.

:yes::sorry1:

 

[Revoltingest]

Wimps!
Warnings are appropriate for some things, but if someone with extreme sensitivities is going to
take the time to read a book, then one can take the time to read reviews of it beforehand.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

Stupid. I don't support labeling of music and I don't support labeling of books. Just look the book up and see what it's about before reading it.

 

[Amechania]

Can you imagine being the literature professor having to come up with a reading list that isn't trigger-worthy? That way madness lies indeed.

 

[Quintessence]

I have little problem with the idea of having a content rating classification system for literature similar to what we have for film, television, movies, and the like. Such has already been adopted in a piecemeal fashion already (you see it in the graphic novel industry sometimes). Standardizing would help teachers, educators, parents, and consumers make more informed decisions about media.

 

[HexBomb]

I can understand this on multiple levels. I understand the desire for trigger warnings, and I've been known to toss Wuthering Heights and far less literary books across the room when the material has offended me. I know when I was forced to read Wuthering Heights in middle school, it fed into my already sensitive ethnicity issues, and was damaging.

At the same time, however, it is impossible to warn for everything. I write fanfiction and original fiction regularly, and I have had people lambast me for not warning for this or that, when such a thing never occurred to me that it would be an issue. Reviews are not always going to give you a hint about whether something will be triggering, and effects can be serious.

That said, it is not anyone's job to police reading material. I think teachers need to be sensitive toward books that will cause issues for certain students, and have ways to help and counsel their students if they see a trigger or a panic attack happening in class, or if a student comes to them, but this is just not feasible in the long term.

 

[Quagmire]

University of California in Santa Barbara, I'm posting from their library right now.

I'm so proud.

 

[CynthiaCypher]

And someone in this very forum once insinuated to me that bull **** and insanity is missing on the left-side of the political spectrum.

So much for that theory.

 

[Quintessence]

At the same time, however, it is impossible to warn for everything. I write fanfiction and original fiction regularly, and I have had people lambast me for not warning for this or that, when such a thing never occurred to me that it would be an issue. Reviews are not always going to give you a hint about whether something will be triggering, and effects can be serious.

Of course it's impossible to warn for everything, but we have generalized ratings for other forms of media anyway, don't we? There's no reason why it couldn't be done with literature. Arguably, a general system is better than no system at all.

That said, it is not anyone's job to police reading material.

There are actually people who do this already, and in a very similar context. When librarians put together specialist collections - notably when they compose collections for elementary school libraries versus middle school libraries or high school ones - they look at content to determine whether or not the book is suitable for the collection. In addition, parents and concerned students can challenge the presence of a particular book in the collection in the case something was missed. It's very feasible in the long term, and it is already being done on some scale.

That said, public schools across America have been in the habit of axing library staffing positions lately. This creates all sorts of problems in properly managing a library collection, and unless our governments are willing to properly fund schools so they can reliably have a librarian on staff, I agree it would be much less feasible to create additional implementation - IF this implementation was handled on a school-by-school level. In all likelihood, it would be a national content standard overseen by some other governing body. Still, quite doable. Especially now with computer technology and advances in cataloging.

 

[dust1n]

If you have a class, I don't see a problem with including books or movies with trigger warnings on the syllabus. (The article said it was about the movie, but then I guess books got brought into the mix, which I thought were generally read during the actual class it self).

Yeah, most teachers that exist are capable of working with alternative assignments for students who are concerned.

 

[CynthiaCypher]

This of course is censorship. That is all this is attempting to do, to censor material certain people do not like.

 

[Quintessence]

This of course is censorship. That is all this is attempting to do, to censor material certain people do not like.

No, it's not. Advisements and warnings do not constitute censorship. Or do you consider the movie rating system to be "censorship" as well?

 

[dust1n]

This of course is censorship.

As long as actual material isn't altered, I don't see how adding info about the book qualifies as censorship.

 

[CynthiaCypher]

No, it's not. Advisements and warnings do not constitute censorship.

Sure. It is a childish effort to label some literature "bad" just because it might hurt someone's feelings or make them feel uncomfortable. It is censorship pura and simple.

 

[Quintessence]

Sure. It is a childish effort to label some literature "bad" just because it might hurt someone's feelings or make them feel uncomfortable. It is censorship pura and simple.

Except that's not what they're doing, that's not what the intent is, and descriptive labeling something is not censorship. Redacting, deleting, and removing things is censorship. Do you really want me to quote the dictionary?

 

[CynthiaCypher]

As long as actual material isn't altered, I don't see how adding info about the book qualifies as censorship.

Maybe some author do not want their works thus labeled.

This is no better than what the PMRC did decades ago. It was censorship then and it is censorship now.

 

[dust1n]

Sure. It is a childish effort to label some literature "bad" just because it might hurt someone's feelings or make them feel uncomfortable. It is censorship pura and simple.

I'm not sure triggering someone's PTSD is the same as hurting their feelings or making them uncomfortable. People who were in my classes... war veterans, family abuse, sexual assault...

 

[dust1n]

Maybe some author do not want their works thus labeled.

And maybe some people want to know whats in the book before they read it. Should we take down all the spark notes and Amazon summaries from the internet to respect what the author wanted?

This is no better than what the PMRC did decades ago. It was censorship then and it is censorship now.

Am I suppose to be making a connection to a specific historical reference here or something?