Is the only kind of magic left to literature dark magic — the power to harm with words? Recent debates in literary studies sometimes make it seem so. Consider the most-downloaded episode of the C19 Podcast, a podcast series produced by The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. The episode, which appeared in 2019, is called “The N Word in the Classroom: Just Say No.” The Reaganite moralism of the episode’s title gives a good sense of the whole. Here are some college classroom rules insisted on by the host, a professor of American literature:
The N-word won’t be used in this class by a person of any race, even if it consistently appears in our texts. The same goes for the F-word, regardless of a person’s perceived sexual orientation or gender expression. And this is simply not a space in which we call people trash.