Teaching Controversy

Mailer in the College Classroom

Abstract

Norman Mailer worked to change definitions of obscenity in his writing and the brash controversies of his writing makes him an especially compelling figure for the college classroom. Teaching provocative works by Mailer encourages students to see how controversies change over time and how their authors are celebrated and censored, often in direct response to these changes. One reason that Mailer works well in a college classroom is that he challenges his readers to move beyond rigid definitions of the moral and aesthetic. Mailer demands from his readers a marked distance and suspension of judgment in order to see what surface vulgarity can often obscure. This necessary distancing encourages students to make their own decisions about the relevance (or irrelevance) of obscenity charges to a text as a whole.