Teachers and librarians are contemporary heroes, caught in the crossfire between challenges of books from the political left and the right.
To teach or not to teach “Of Mice and Men”? If it’s taught, how do teachers do it? What about trigger warnings, in the news recently when a Muslim student complained about seeing a picture of the Prophet in an art history class at Hamline University? Do we handle “cancel culture” by simply making challenged books disappear? And what is all this anger about books doing to our young people’s’ abilities to learn from literature?
These are the big questions that Deborah Appleman tackles in “Literature and the New Culture Wars”