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Lecture 1: IntroductionScholarly debates
• Defining censorship*
• → ‘New censorship’ debate
• Effect and impact
• Has Censorship (artistic) benefits?
• Has literature (art) a privileged position?
• Does market censorship exist?
Defining censorship: Formal and exclusive*
• ‘Prohibiting, changing or destroying ideas in printed or audio-visual form, that are
considered immoral, subversive, or secret by the authorities
• Formal censorship
• → Preventive (pre-publication) vs. repressive (post-publication)
• Ecclesiastical (from church) vs. secular censorship
Redefining censorship: Inclusive
• New censorship debate
• → Different types of censorship (formal & informal)
• → Regulative vs. Constitutive
• → Conclusions about censorship should be provisional, rather than fixed.
• Plural, rather than singular.
• Time and site-specific, rather than universal.
Defining censorship: Broad and inclusive
‘Censorship is a variety of processes, formal and informal, open and hidden, conscious and
unconscious, by which restrictions are imposed on the collection, display, dissemination, and
exchange of information, opinions, ideas and imaginative expressions’
• Importance informal censorship
Four motives for censorship
• Political grounds
• → National interest and security
• Social grounds
• → Offence, slander, hate speech, racism
• Sexual grounds
• → Pornography, obscenity
• Religious grounds
• → Orthodoxy vs. heterodoxy
• → Blasphemy
,Offence and punishments
• Who and how?
• → Author, translator, publisher, bookseller, performer, actor
• → Fine, excommunication, banishment, imprisonment, execution
• What and how?
• → Manuscripts, books, films, photos
• → Alterations, confiscations
• → Destruction, burning
, Lecture 2: Literature, the printing press and censorship
*Focus on germany and Italy
• Fast develop of print, and therefore censorship
The ‘evil’ of the printing press
Movable type
• The fact that you can use loose elements to compose a text
• Before, books were copied by hand
• → This was time consuming
• → Not one single copy was the same
• Now, we’re able to produce identical copies in a short amount of time
• → This was a revolutionary breaktrough
• Printing books became a big investment (expensive)
Instead of copying for a demand, book printers had to create their own anonymous audience
• How? By advertisements (this was never done before)
• Title pages were also developed into advertisements (economic consequences)
→ Texts in the vernacular
• Doing this in order to get more sales and a bigger audience
• This had a positive effect on over-all literacy (social consequences)
→ Dangerous lay literacy
• Knowledge undermines piety
• Books of work of the devil
Writers, scholars, and the press
• Anna Bijns, Sebastian Brant
• → “Profit-seeking, false ideas, limited choices, errors, superfluous”
• Humanists
• → Youth ruined by idle fiction
• Discussions in prologues
• → “Printed verses and fables teach vanities without any benefit or edification” *(ex).*
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