A UK university has attached a trigger warning to Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen’s biting satire, for ‘toxic relationships’. Ironically, Jodi McAlister loves it for the gentle romance at its centre.
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Articles on Trigger warnings
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Trigger warnings are increasingly ubiquitous but recent research finds they are ineffective, and possibly harmful, if used in a tokenistic way.
Despite arguments that young children have enjoyed Jane Eyre for 150 years, the Victorians were much more concerned about the novel’s influence than universities are today.
Even Samuel Johnson found some of Shakespeare’s violent scenes unwatchable.
Reading the poem Eurydice to her students unleashed surprising emotions for Stephanie Trigg. But literature works in mysterious, unpredictable ways, highlighting the impossibility of trigger warnings.
Highly restrictive speech codes are now the norm in some of the world’s universities.
Who am I, as an academic, to decide in advance what is or what is not triggering to others?
In the fraught debate over trigger warnings in the university classroom, they are routinely associated with censorship and silencing. Yet for teachers, they can open up a discussion of difficult material – not suppress it.
An archaeology lecturer was lambasted for allowing students to step out if they get upset. Why he was right to do so.
There are calls for Ovid’s Metamorphoses to be taught with a trigger warning. This 15-book epic is a rollercoaster of a read, with moments of both delicious joy and abject depravity. Like much great art, it was not created to please.
Lecturers need to flag up graphic material with their students before they click on it.
If you’ve been involved in internet discussions about sensitive topics like sexual abuse, you may have seen the letters “TW”, short for “trigger warning”. The convention originated primarily on feminist…
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Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies, Monash University
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University of Newcastle
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Senior Lecturer in Writing, Literature and Culture, Deakin University
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Senior Lecturer in Learning Technology, Bath Spa University
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Professor of English Literature, University of Southern Queensland
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Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of English Literature, The University of Melbourne
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Senior Lecturer in History of Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, University of Exeter
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Associate Professor in English Literatures, University of Wollongong
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Professor of Conflict History and Archaeology, University of Glasgow
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Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Kent
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Senior Lecturer in English Literature, York St John University
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Lecturer in English, Keele University
