| re: ‘It’s ludicrous’: Ian McKellen sparks debate over trigger warnings in theatre | |
| Posted by: BruceinIthaca 05:56 am EDT 10/03/23 | |
| In reply to: re: ‘It’s ludicrous’: Ian McKellen sparks debate over trigger warnings in theatre - HunterHailey 07:30 pm EDT 10/02/23 | |
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| A few years ago, I taught an upper-level college course titled "AIDS and the Arts," in which we read novels, plays, memoirs, and poetry, and viewed films, all either addressing the AIDS crisis or emerging directly from it. At the beginning of the semester, I told the students, "Everything you will read or view in this class will depict death, illness, often violence, discussion/depiction of sexualities." Considered this a blanket "trigger warning"--the material is such that for me to identify what difficult material shows up in each text would both take forever and rob you of the experience of encountering the material in your own way." While one or two students dropped the course (it had a very long and demanding reading list--a design flaw on my part, I readily admit), it was not because of the content of the material. The course was an elective that could fulfill a number of requirements (a choice among advanced courses in the major, as well as for the Women's and Gender Studies minor), so the audience was self-selected. But a course in Greek tragedy or Shakespeare will contain potentially upsetting material (read Medea or Titus Andronicus lately?)--I'm on the side of McKellen here. Granted, from time to time, an unexpected trigger can happen (I taught Cather's "Paul's Case," which ends in a particularly disturbing suicide and one of my students had a brother who had ended his life the same way. She asked to be excused from class that day--of course, I not only allowed her to, but strongly recommended it, given her understandable dismay--she came to me before class began and explained the situation, fighting back tears). Some common sense seems in order in not traumatizing people, but audiences need to make choices and to investigate if they have trigger areas. My student was respectful and smart about what she knew would be too much for her and, as a teacher, I cared more for her welfare in that moment than in her sitting through a discussion of a great story that would nonetheless not serve her well. She will have a whole lifetime to reread Cather's classic, should should she want to. | |
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