ENG 4834 Spring 2019 Gontarski

This course focuses on contemporary issues in publishing (in our information age), but it takes a long, historical view of those issues. We will discuss ethics and the legalities of publishing, what publishers, or today any individual, can and cannot say publicly, and we will try to assess the delicate balance among an individual’s right to express herself as guaranteed in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, the public’s right to read (or hear, or view), and the Government’s obligation to protect its population and, presumably, itself from threat. The course will move from the death of Socrates, to issues surrounding the most censored book in the world, The Bible, to the intellectual climate that shaped the cultural revolution we all too loosely call the 60s, to contemporary restrictions in the information age, including the Fatwa against British novelist Salman Rushdie, The Pentagon Papers, Wikileaks, and file sharing of copyrighted material. We will be working closely, extensively even, with The Free Expression Policy Project of ACLU (q.v. below) as a comprehensive compendium of information, and for historical sweep the Liveink “A Brief History of Reading” site, previews of both as follows:
http://www.fepproject.org/fepp/notinfront.html and http://www.liveink.com/whatis/history.htm