Lind on Zensur und Fiktion: Von Fake News bis fiktionale Literatur (Censorship and Fiction: From Fake News to Fictional Literature)

Hans Lind, Yale University, has published Zensur und Fiktion: Von Fake News bis fiktionale Literatur (Censorship and Fiction: From Fake News to Fictional Literature) as Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law & International Law (MPIL) Research Paper No. 2024-15. Here is the abstract.

German Abstract: Der Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Zensur informationeller Falschnachrichten im westlichen Kulturkreis, einschließlich bewusster Lügen und Fake News. Weiterhin werden fiktionale literarische Werke und performative Kunstformen thematisiert – von Romanverbotsverfahren bis zur rechtlichen Sanktionierung von Rap und anderen autofiktionalen Literaturformen.

 

English Abstract: The handbook entry will address the censorship of counterfactual communication, including intentional lies and fake news. Furthermore, fictional literary works and performative art forms will be addressed, from banned books to the judicial sanctioning of rap/hip-hop and other auto-fictional forms of literature.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Ted Laros: Literature and the Law in South Africa, 1910-2010 (2017) @Cultuur_OU @rowmanandlittlefield

Ted Laros, Open University of the Netherlands, has published Literature and the Law in South Africa, 1910–2010: The Long Walk to Artistic Freedom (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

In 1994, artistic freedom pertaining inter alia to literature was enshrined in the South African Constitution. Clearly, the establishment of this right was long overdue compared to other nations within the Commonwealth. Indeed, the legal framework and practices regarding the regulation of literature that were introduced following the nation’s transition to a non-racial democracy seemed to form a decisive turning point in the history of South African censorship of literature. This study employs a historical sociological point of view to describe how the nation’s emerging literary field helped pave the way for the constitutional entrenchment of this right in 1994. On the basis of institutional and poetological analyses of all the legal trials concerning literature that were held in South Africa during the period 1910–2010, it describes how the battles fought in and around the courts between literary, judicial and executive elites eventually led to a constitutional exceptio artis for literature. As the South African judiciary displayed an ongoing orientation towards both English and American law in this period, the analyses are firmly placed in the context of developments occurring concurrently in these two legal systems.

 

Bricker on After the Golden Age: Libel, Caricature, and the Deverbalization of Satire

Andrew Bricker, Ghent University of Belgium, has published After the Golden Age: Libel, Caricature, and the Deverbalization of Satire, at 51 Eighteenth-Century Studies 305 (2018). Here is the abstract.

It is a commonplace of literary history that satire vanishes in the middle of the eighteenth century. It is clear, however, that written and especially visual satire witnessed massive growth in the final decades of the century and throughout the Romantic era. My goal is to explain this simultaneous contraction and expansion of the satiric marketplace. Rather than dying, I argue, satire began to migrate to visual media, and especially caricature, after mid-century. The reason for this migration was the shifting procedural norms of libel law itself. Over the first half of the century, the courts developed procedures for delimiting verbal ambiguity in trials for libel that made the publication of written satire perilous. These same procedures were largely useless, however, in the prosecution of visual materials, which made at best sparing use of words—they were, as I put it, "deverbalized"—and were therefore not subject to the same rulings and interpretive procedures.

You may be able to download the text from Project Muse at the link.

Unintended Consequences--Censorship and Humor

Laura E. Little, Temple University School of Law, is publishing Laughing at Censorship in the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities. Here is the abstract.

Comedians know from experience, and research supports the proposition, that an audience will predictably laugh when observing a censored statement (whether bleeped or otherwise obscured) – at least where the audience has been primed by the context to interpret the statement as comedic. In a society that condemns censorship as the enemy of our cherished right of free expression, one might reasonably ask how this can be: why is censorship funny? This article begins by canvassing the various forms of censorship humor flourishing throughout United States culture in print, film, television, music, and internet entertainment. The article then probes mainstream condemnation of censorship – observing that individuals, law, and society all benefit from line drawing – even in the context of something as special as freedom of communication. Through the lens of interdisciplinary humor studies as well as First Amendment doctrine, the article explores the notion that the laughter emerging from comedy featuring censorship might be a “tell” that exposes this truth. Many censorship jokes simply ridicule the censor. Others, however, are more nuanced, suggesting that censorship humor might provide unique emotional rewards ranging from a spark emitted from the benign danger of a censored joke, the creative enterprise of imagining what message was – to the comfort of mapping the line between the proper and improper. Audience laughter at censorship humor often appears to derive primarily from pleasure. It might also include a measure of anxiety, fear, and anger. That complexity, however, does not mitigate the possibility that humans occasionally see and enjoy some inherent value of censorship as separating “right” from “wrong.”

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Professor Little's comments on censorship humor remind me of one of my favorite passages from The Innocents Abroad. In it, Mark Twain discusses his visit to the Jardin Mabille and his experience of that scandalous dance, the "can-can."  "The dance had begun, and we adjourned to the temple. Within it was a drinking saloon, and all around it was a broad circular platform for the dancers. I backed up against the wall of the temple, and waited. Twenty sets formed, the music struck up, and then—I placed my hands before my face for very shame. But I looked through my fingers." Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Co., 1869), Chapter 14.



 

The State of Literature: Was It Under Siege? Is It Still?

From NPR: one story about three books that made it past Soviet censors and another consoling us that literature and language will survive in spite of individual tastes and governmental policies.