Student Arrested for Creative Writng Essay
I don’t know if this story is simply the knee-jerk fallout from the recent Virginia Tech shootings, or if this student would have been arrested anyway. But it appears that an Illinois student was arrested for writing an essay as part of a creative writing assignment, in which all students were told not to censor what they write.
Here’s an excerpt from cnn.com:
According to the complaint, Lee’s essay reads in part, "Blood, sex and booze. Drugs, drugs, drugs are fun. Stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, s…t…a…b…puke. So I had this dream last night where I went into a building, pulled out two P90s and started shooting everyone, then had sex with the dead bodies. Well, not really, but it would be funny if I did."
Disturbing? Depends on how you look at it. As in exercise in creative writing, where one just lets the thoughts flow, it looks like exactly that, the writer let the thoughts flow and this is what came out. Certainly I have written some things in my day that people might find "disturbing" and I have never gotten arrested.
It’s interesting, because if the school officials would look back at the history of literature, this type of violent writing, with allusions to necrophilia (sex with the dead) is nothing new. In fact, Thomas Middleton wrote a play during the time of Shakespeare called "The Second Maiden’s Tragedy". The plot consists of a jealous husband who tries to test his wife’s virtue by having his friend seduce her. And the play features a tyrant that is very much into necrophilia – if I remember correctly, he crowns a dead woman queen.
This play is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many plays written in the same era as Shakespeare that features murder, suicide, rape, incest, necrophilia and just about every other sadistic thing you can think of. Even the Bard himself wrote material one can look at as "disturbing" – but I don’t hear any calls for banning Shakespeare from our public schools.
My point is that we can’t start arresting people every time someone writes something out of the ordinary, absurd, disturbing or any other way you want to describe it. At the very worst, the teacher should have given the student a failing grade, but even that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense considering he was following the assignment’s instructions. But arresting him?
My advice for the school in question and even for the police: read more Shakespeare, you might just learn something.
Read the entire cnn.com article here:
Student arrested for essay’s imaginary violence
Related Posts
- Don’t Blame Literature for Violence
- Getting Your Creative Juices Flowing!
- Classics deemed boring – turned away!
- Happy Birthday Shakespeare!
Read More: Censorship, Misc.
