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'Triggering'. When and where did the usage
originate? No one is sure. There is, however, clear connection with the
psychiatric term 'trauma trigger' - stimuli which can detonate unhealed wounds.
The concept of triggering took off in
feminist magazines and social media 'chat' around 2010. Around 2013/14 it moved,
wholesale, into higher education. In May 2014, the
New York Times reported
that at scores of institutions student bodies were demanding trigger warnings
in their courses for canonical texts. It reached a floodmark with a survey by
The Times of London in August 2022 which found that British universities
had covertly added trigger warnings to over a thousand texts, including the
works of literary greats such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Jane
Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie.
Politicians in the US, UK and Australia
vilifies triggering with the sarcasms 'wokery' and 'snowflakery'. What is
overlooked in the heat of the argument is that triggering is categorically
different from traditional institutional controls on literature. Triggering,
done responsibly, honours the fact that great literature is great because it
is, as Kafka says, powerful.
In this extraordinary polemic, John
Sutherland - former Visiting Professor of Literature at the
California Institute of Technology - takes a wide-ranging and characteristically
nuanced look at the history of triggering and censorship in literature and
shows how it has become a theatre of culture warfare. Politicians in the great
sectors of the English-speaking world have taken up arms in that conflict.
Jonathan Swift's 'Battle of the Books' has flared up again.
About the author
John Sutherland is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English
Literature at University College London and previously taught at the California
Institute of Technology. He writes regularly for
The Guardian,
The Times and the
New York Times and is the author of
many books, including
Curiosities of
Literature;
Henry V, War Criminal? (with Cedric
Watts); biographies of Walter Scott, Stephen Spender and the Victorian elephant
Jumbo; and
The Boy Who Loved Books,
a memoir. He is currently editing
The Oxford Companion to Popular Fiction.
Summary
In this characteristically nuanced and calmly objective study, the witty John Sutherland guides us through the increasingly rocky terrain of triggering. His advice rings clear: literature matters, to us and what we make of our world, and it must be handled with critical care.
