Ulrich Baer
Great Books Banned: Aesthetic and Legal Judgments
Recently government agencies in the United States are removing and/or banning books from public schools and libraries. Progressive critics have also called for some books to be culled from reading lists. Given the special status and legal protection of free speech in the United States, how do we make sense of these restrictions from the right and the left? Is this a continuation of the culture and canon wars from the 1990s, when conservatives censored works they called obscene, and progressives replaced mainstream authors with marginalized voices? This talk proposes that what is being adjudicated and suppressed in these cases is literature itself, rather than specific authors or works.
Ulrich Baer is University Professor at New York University where he teaches literature and photography, and serves as Director of NYU’s Center for the Humanities. A recipient of Getty, Humboldt, and Guggenheim fellowships, he has twice been honored with NYU’s student-nominated Golden Dozen Teaching Award. He serves on the board of the New York Institute for the Humanities, where he has also been a fellow since 2002. Baer’s published oeuvre includes books on a range of topics, including poetry, photography, free speech, September 11, Holocaust testimonies, as well as a dystopian novel (We Are But a Moment, 2017), and a collection of stories (Beggar’s Chicken: Stories from Shanghai, 2012). His analysis of free speech in the 21st century university, What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Truth, and Equality on Campus (2019), deepens his widely debated defense of the university’s obligation to use free speech as a tool to create knowledge by the greatest number of participants.