When Writers Lose Faith in Free Speech
When it comes to threats to free expression, we usually think of government censorship.
Key points
- Medieval Jews would have known what to do with him.” Young Roth shot off a letter to Rackman: “He who criticizes must be silenced—that is a terrible tenet to have to live by, Rabbi, and I should imagine even more terrible to a spiritual leader.” Writers work in the creative tension between freedom and attachment.
- For the past decade, we in the West have been preoccupied with the divisive effects of the propaganda and lies that free people avidly consume on social media.
- When the Iranian regime sentenced Salman Rushdie to death, Roth had him to dinner at his London flat, accompanied by half a dozen security officers.
He edited Writers From the Other Europe so that work by Milan Kundera and other Eastern Europeans could bypass the Communist censors and be made widely available to English-speaking readers.
In 1959, 25-year-old Roth published a short story called “Defender of the Faith” in The New Yorker, just ahead of its inclusion in his first book, Goodbye, Columbus.
Additional details
- The critic Lionel Trilling wrote: “The most effective agent of the moral imagination has been the novel of the last two hundred years.” Roth’s readiness to experiment and provoke expanded his readers’ moral imagination—their ability to see beyond the appearances of their lives to the deeper reality.
- I don’t think this is a complete coincidence, because no other literary form has such plasticity and variety; no other genre is so concerned with the moral struggles of individuals amid the social forces that constrict or enlarge their humanity.
- If democracy is the political system that allows the fullest human flourishing, the novel is the literary form that most fully cultivates our understanding of human possibility and tragedy and endurance.
- He’s carried on a relentless campaign of legal actions and verbal attacks against journalists, broadcasters, comedians, immigrants with unpopular views, and just about anyone who criticizes him.
- They have to maintain an inner distance from external demands, including the demands of politics; at the same time, they aren’t excused from the responsibilities of being a human and a citizen.
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