Robert Darnton's Censors At Work

Robert Darnton’s ethnographic approach to exploring what censorship is in many respects enhances the arguments made in more theoretical readings on censorship and in some cases modifies and rebuts them so that they accommodate for social power dynamics and cultural differences in the situation he is discussing.

In Darnton’s Censors at Work, by exploring the manifestations of censorship in three vastly different eras and parts of the world he enhances the arguments made by Michael Holquist in his article on the nature of censorship. One of the main points that Holquist makes in his article, as he puts it is “To be for or against censorship is to assume a freedom no one has, censorship is, one can only discriminate for or against its more and less repressive effects” (Holquist 16). In other words, censorship is

In his French and GDR example, he clearly illustrates the process that was censorship. In the case of Bourbon France the censors worked to edit manuscripts and give it a privilege so that it could be published. Though a relatively short process, it was not a singular act of choosing not to publish something so much as it was a series of actions to control the quality of literature and ensure that the king’s reputation and the authority of the church would remain intact. In contrast, the process of censorship in the GDR was significantly longer. This process consisted of the party censors editing manuscripts and collaborating and negotiating with the authors on the state level and on the party level it consisted of the state defending the Plan of literature that was to be published and ensuring that all works of the plan adhered to the ideology of the party. As Darnton shows in his diagram of the chain of command in his book (Darnton 149), the GDR’s government was quite the bureaucracy and thus, a very long, thorough process of