Triggered Literature

‘Triggering’. When and where did the usageoriginate? No one is sure. There is, however, clear connection with thepsychiatric term ‘trauma trigger’ – stimuli which can detonate unhealed wounds.

The concept of triggering took off infeminist magazines and social media ‘chat’ around 2010. Around 2013/14 it moved,wholesale, into higher education. In May 2014, the New York Times reportedthat at scores of institutions student bodies were demanding trigger warningsin their courses for canonical texts. It reached a floodmark with a survey byThe Times of London in August 2022 which found that British universitieshad covertly added trigger warnings to over a thousand texts, including theworks of literary greats such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, JaneAusten, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie.

Politicians in the US, UK and Australiavilifies triggering with the sarcasms ‘wokery’ and ‘snowflakery’. What isoverlooked in the heat of the argument is that triggering is categoricallydifferent from traditional institutional controls on literature. Triggering,done responsibly, honours the fact that great literature is great because itis, as Kafka says, powerful.

In this extraordinary polemic, JohnSutherland – former Visiting Professor of Literature at theCalifornia Institute of Technology  – takes a wide-ranging and characteristicallynuanced look at the history of triggering and censorship in literature andshows how it has become a theatre of culture warfare. Politicians in the greatsectors of the English-speaking world have taken up arms in that conflict.Jonathan Swift’s ‘Battle of the Books’ has flared up again.