Mullally and Ringel on Book Banning

    I found both of these articles to be very illuminating on the issue of book banning in America in the twenty-first century. To begin with Mullally's article and her assessment of the history of literary censorship in the West, I find her argument to be quite compelling. Mullally covers two aspects of censorship history that I think are important to consider in our modern day discussions. The first is the aspect of who has the authority to pass judgment on texts and create laws or statutes that result in their prohibition or destruction. Mullally points out throughout history that it is always sources of entrenched, systemic influence who can effect censorship in a widescale manner. She indicates sources of authority such as the British Crown and the Catholic Church who have enacted censorship laws throughout history, and she expertly traces a through-line demonstrating that the reason texts are censored by these large, powerful cultural institutions is because many of the banned texts promote an anti-religious, anti-establishment, or broadly anti-tradition message and thus are viewed as dangerous. Censorship at its core is, and has always been, about the privation of the ruled from the ideas that can liberate them. 

    This then builds upon Mullally's next aspect of censorship history which she covers: the evolution of information and its dissemination. Mullally notes that an effective method of censorship before widescale printing was simply to burn the physical texts to prevent anyone from reading them. Once the printing press was invented and popular texts were created and transmitted en masse across Europe, however, this method became obsolete. This led to reactionary efforts from European monarchs and Church officials to halt the printing of books altogether until they could devise a way to prohibit only certain books from being printed and circulated. If we then contextualize this issue in today's age of information, it would almost seem impossible for book banning to have any effect considering most things can be found online immediately anyway. Mullally disagrees obviously, and so too does Ringel.

    In his article, Ringel elucidates the many ways in which book banning in America has arisen and developed over time, starting from the inception of the market of children's literature all the way to the present day and discussions of modern books being taken off the shelves of school libraries. Ringel demonstrates throughout his article how the banning of certain books, regardless of the reasonings for which they are banned, transmit a message about which social values and ideas are important, dangerous, correct, morally corrupting, etc. He essentially says that, when children are denied access to certain ideas, they come to develop preconceived notions about the nature of these ideas although they have not been directly exposed to them. He also notes that, in many cases of book banning, the people who are calling for certain books to be banned have never read them in the first place and are not able to even articulate the problems that they have with the books in the first place. To put him into conversation with Mullally, Ringel only further demonstrates that book banning and censorship, including in its modern form in America, is entirely about the control of information and ideas, and that censorship laws and book banning movements are more often than not enacted by those in power who fear these texts lest they become unseated by those who are inspired by these texts' ideas.