Doni Wilson has penned a satirical piece for The Federalist, suggesting 9 “trigger warnings” for very sensitive students who are about to read Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
This week the British publication The Guardian reported that “Students in America have been asking for “trigger warnings” to be included on works of literature which deal with topics such as rape or war.” Works that were of concern to students at the University of California at Santa Barbara included Things Fall Apart, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Great Gatsby, all of which I have taught. This demand for fair warning so that those who have been traumatized can adequately prepare for the shock of what they read assumes that having something in a syllabus (which may or may not be read by students anyway) will insulate students from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that may come up in any given text…
So I was thinking, since I am teaching Hamlet to students in an intense two-week course called Fast Term, if I had known about this new demand for “trigger warnings,” how exactly would I accommodate this need for this particular play?
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