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The purpose of this study was to analyze a representative seventy-eight current young adult books to determine the extent to which they contain items which are objectionable to would-be censors. Seventy-eight books were identified which fit the criteria of popularity and literary quality. Content analysis was selected as the quantitative method of research. Each of the seventy-eight young adult books was analyzed for the six categories which were established through prior research. The six categories include profanity, sex, violence, parent conflict, drugs, and condoned bad behavior. These categories were tallied each time they occurred in the books. Reliability was assured with a rating of .98 by a committee of six professionals. The data reveal that profanity occurred more times in the seventy-eight books than the other five categories with a total of 5,616. The category of drugs was noted 4,171 times. References to sex followed in number with 3,174. The categories which occurred the least were violence with 1,849 occurrences and condoned bad behavior with only 489 occurrences. By applying a frequency index formula to determine the number of objections in each book in relation to the number of pages, a comparison among the books could be made. The analysis, synthesis, and interpretation of the data led to several conclusions. Local school systems should establish and follow procedures for book selection and removal. The interests of young adults are met by the presentation of a variety of ideas and realistic plots and settings. The books, even with objectionable items, are chosen by teachers and students to read; therefore, they should be accessible in secondary school libraries as they provide valuable reading experiences for young adults. This study established that young adult literature serves an important function in providing quality reading material of interest to teenagers. These reading experiences help broaden the learning environment for young adults.

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This thesis examines the censorship of translated literature in the Soviet Union between the 1930s and the 1960s. Reconsidering traditional understandings of censorship, I employ a theoretical approach influenced by Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu in order to understand censorship as a set of inter-related practices enacted by multiple agents, occupying points on a continuum of censorship that ranges from external authoritarian intervention to internalised, unconscious norms. An analysis of literary texts translated from English into Russian in the literary journals Internatsional’naia literatura and Inostrannaia literatura is supplemented by examination of archival material from these journals and the censorship agency, Glavlit; I aim to reconstruct the various layers of censorship carried out by translator, editor or external agents. My analysis begins with a study of the publications patterns of the journals, examining the inclusion and exclusion of texts as an attempt to impose a canon of foreign literature. Employing internal reviews and records of editorial meetings, I demonstrate that ideological control of foreign literature was not completely repressive, and that a number of texts not conforming to Soviet standards found their way onto the pages of the journal. The next chapters study censorship on the textual level. A chapter on puritanical censorship discusses how sexual and vulgar language was removed from the texts, noting the relative easing of censorship in the post-Stalin era. Puritanical censorship was often incomplete, inviting the reader to reconstruct the original meaning. The chapter on political censorship shows how taboo topics were removed or entirely misrepresented in the Stalin era, but modified less drastically in the post-Stalin texts. The following study of the censorship of ideologically marked language examines how censorship aimed to erase unorthodox uses of certain terms, imposing an authoritative meaning on these texts, and ensuring the continued circulation of canonical symbols in a limited discursive framework. Ideological censorship also created intertextuality between the English texts and the Soviet context, attempting to make those texts a part of Soviet discourse. Through an examination of these intersecting censorship practices I problematise the phenomenon, highlighting ways in which the regulation of foreign texts could be incomplete, and ways in which censorial agents often sought to undermine censorship, even as they acted as censors.

Thesis (B.A.)--Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

In the last decade of last century, the advent of the Internet as the predominant medium of communication for the masses prompted countless observers and social sciences scholars to predict the end of physical borders; a revolution in the way we understood the nation-state and the concept of sovereignty. The Internet, a medium that seemed not to be confined to the same territorial delimitations that traditional media was subjected to, would simultaneously represent and promote the achievement of the “one world” scenario that globalization promised; a world in which information could flow free from governmental control and official censorship. Thus, the ideological foundation of authoritarian regimes, such as that of the People’s Republic of China, faced a dire threat – or so the theory went. Today, fifteen years after the Chinese incursion into cyberspace, the veil of idealism and simplistic thinking that elicited those initial claims has been lifted from our eyes, and recent events have further demonstrated that the web is still subject, and will continue to be subject, to territorial delimitation. This reality was further illustrated in June 2010 with the publication of the first Chinese White Paper entirely dedicated to the Internet, which revealed the overarching principle guiding Beijing’s Internet control efforts: the assertion of what it calls “Internet sovereignty”, the supreme authority by the Chinese Communist Party to control which kind of information enters its borders through the Internet and is spread within. While China is not the only country trying to restrict the access of online information from abroad to its borders, it is the first country in the world to actually make an official plea sovereignty over the Web. However, despite the boldness of its content, Section V of the Internet White Paper sparked “outrage, concern, but surprisingly not much discussion”. Ever since the first connection was established in the country, the examination of the political aspects of the Chinese Internet has mainly revolved around the issues of censorship and surveillance. Yet, the spat between the Chinese government and Internet giant Google raised the stakes in the debate considerably, as it prompted the Chinese Communist Party to make explicit its claims of sovereignty over the Internet and advance its strategy of fragmentation of the Web; something that a few years ago was considered nearly impossible. For this reason, this study seeks to answer the question: How does the Chinese government intend to apply its national sovereignty, which has traditionally been understood primarily in geographical terms, to a medium that seems to be exempt of geographical location?

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