Teaching Controversy

Norman Mailer in the College Classroom

Authors

  • Heather Braun University of Akron Author

Keywords:

teaching, controversial literature, censorship and obscenity, "The Time of Her Time", masculinity and performance, sexuality in literature, unreliable narration

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.

Author Biography

  • Heather Braun, University of Akron

    Heather Braun is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Akron where she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature. Her research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century women writers, the Victorian doppelgänger, and Adolescent literature. Her book, The Rise and Fall of the Femme Fatale in British Literature, 1790–1910, was published by Fairleigh Dickinson UP in 2012.

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Published

2026-10-10

Issue

Vol. 8 No. 1 (2014): Future Bound

Section

Articles