Source: Michele Janette, 785-532-0772, mjanette@k-state.edu
Pronouncer: Janette is pronounced Ji-net
News release prepared by: Amber Haag, 785-532-6415

Friday, September 24, 2004

BANNED BOOKS WEEK SHOWCASES DAILY READINGS IN UNION

MANHATTAN -- Kansas State University is celebrating Banned Books Week with public readings in the K-State Student Union Plaza between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Sept. 27-Oct. 1.

Banned Books Week is observed nationally each year during the last week of September to celebrate the freedom to read, choose or express one's opinion even if the opinion is unpopular or out of the ordinary and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those opinions to all who wish to read them. This is the 23rd year of the national event.

Readings will be chosen by the faculty and library staff who present them. Writers whose works will be read include Dr. Seuss, Maya Angelou, J.D. Salinger, Mark Twain and Toni Morrison. Many of the books featured during Banned Books Week have not been banned, but rather challenged. A challenge is an attempt to ban or restrict materials based upon the objections of a person or group. Only a successful challenge would result in materials being banned or restricted.

Michele Janette, associate professor of English and director of the cultural studies program in the English department, said the program sponsors the week's activities because it brings together many of the issues they care about.

"We believe in the importance of literature as one of our most valuable expressions of human creativity, in all its glorious variety," Janette said. "As scholars, we are interested in the ways that literature reflects and challenges the culture it comes from. We are also interested in how cultures seek to promote creativity, thought and self-reflexive analysis or how they seek to repress it.

"Banned Books Week is a perfect opportunity to bring these issues forward within our local community and culture," she said. "We want to raise awareness that creativity and free speech do receive frequent challenges within our culture. We want to enact a refusal of such censorship by literally putting this literature back into public life.

"Reading aloud from this literature, in public, seems like a logical way to do this," Janette said. "My hope in organizing this event is that passersby will have their day improved by hearing some great literature and will also be encouraged to think about challenges to civil liberties that are currently increasing in 'the land of the free.'"

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