College class tackles dicey issue of Censorship

South Mountain Community College will be offering a unique hybrid class next semester that focuses on controversial books, some have which have been banned in places across America.

This will be the first time SMCC will be offering such a course, and one which the professor said will appeal to people with busy schedules or anyone who just likes to read.

Dr. Alisa Cooper is the professor of the class, titled Banned Books and Censorship, and she came up with the idea to make it into a hybrid course, meaning there will be one in-class meeting per week with the rest of the discussion, as well as the entirety of the class materials, online.

The course will be broken down into three sections with each focusing on a different book. The first section will be based on a book Dr. Cooper has chosen and she said she will be picking between I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Lady

Chatterly's Lover by D. H. Lawrence and The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger.

"Part of excitement is getting to read some of these books in the context of certain themes you wouldn't get to read in the classroom," Cooper said.

Cooper said that Lady Chatterly's Lover was very risqué at the time of publication (1928) and was banned in places throughout England due to the subject matter pertaining to the main character's infidelity.

"The plot is that you have a woman who is having an affair after her husband is in an accident," she said. "To talk about what happened between the two, at the time, was controversial. The whole idea of a wife cheating was not something talked about in the classroom."

For the second section, students will choose from a list of 20 other novels and create a report and presentation based on the ideas presented in the novel while looking at the time period in which it was written.

"The goal will be to choose a text and line it up with one of major issues: gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion or political perspective," she said. "You'll determine what themes the book falls into and under what condition was it banned."

The third section will be a group, multimedia project that will be shown to the class and also presented in the next semester as part of the Banned Books Week.

"The point of the class is to explore these themes and ask why some groups would want to ban them," Cooper said. "I think it is going to be a fun course."

Banned Books and Censorship will be taught on the SMCC Main Campus, 7050 S. 24th St. in Phoenix, on Tuesday mornings from 9:30 to 10:45 a.m., beginning Jan. 20. To see the class Web site, visit http://enh295.ning.com.