Should This Piece Begin with a Trigger Warning?

"In yesterday's creative writing classroom, a draft of a novel might have been considered poorly written or maybe even offensive. Today, it creates a quote-unquote dangerous and harmful classroom that is not a safe space. This is why some professors ask their students to include trigger warnings at the top of their work, or to simply avoid writing about any topic that might trigger another student in the room."

So begins Adam Szetela's YouTube video, How “Sensitivity Readers” Made Modern Fiction Boring.

Here's Szetela's concern. Because campus creative-writing programs have become the dominant training ground for writers, they're now shaped by a culture of hypersensitivity and safety. This sensitivity culture leads to concrete acts of censorship and self-censorship that damage literature. It's too risky to take chances. The result is a broader infantilization of literary culture that produces safer, more predictable, and weaker writing.

He cites examples, beginning with Oberlin College. The school's faculty guidelines include a statement that trigger warnings show students that you care about their safety. In short, we live in "an era of mandatory sensitivity training programs, anonymous bias reporting systems, and other measures instituted by campus bureaucrats," which is having a corrosive effect on would-be novelists, poets, or playwright.

Szetela followed with another example, this one being at the University of Michigan where "professors and students demanded that Bright Sheng, theater and dance, be removed from his course after he screened an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Othello that included blackface." Heaven forbid!! "Exclaimed one student, I was shocked that Shang would show something like this in something that's supposed to be a safe space." Bottom line: Shang survived the Cultural Revolution in China, but he did not remain the professor of his own course here in the land of the free and the brave.

One of the challenges for professors, and writers today as well in this era of squeamish sensitivity, is staying current with the ever-shifting twists and turns of what is OK and what's a no-no. "On campus, even journalism has to be a quote-unquote safe space," Szetela suggests. "According to Northwestern University's newspaper, 'while our goal is to document history and spread information, nothing is more important than ensuring our fellow students feel safe.'"

Author, critic, and New York Times ghostwriter. Szetela's talk is just under 20 minutes. You can find it here.

 

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