Shelley in Baghdad: political potency and institutional censorship
Submitted by rc-admin on
Professor Susan Wolfson has hipped us to a new article in this week's Rolling Stone that discusses, among many other things, an atmosphere at academic institutions that sees Percy Shelley as an ongoing cultural and social threat:
Meanwhile, in Baghdad's universities, departments were rife with sectarianism, and corruption was rotting out standards. Students bought their way into college, then through it. Professors bought research. Religious pressures constrained classes and content. Nadia Faydh, an English professor, was banned from teaching Marxist literary criticism and chastised by her department chair for teaching Shelley's "A Defense of Poetry," a canonical text of English Romanticism. Students had been offended by the way Shelley equated love and poetry with religion.
Wolfson calls the entire article by Roy Scranton "compelling, lucid, powerful." The full text is available here.