Chris Forster is Assistant Professor of English at Syracuse University
In Filthy Material, Forster urges us to see the legal, social, and policy controversies around obscenity as proxies for the ever-changing social process of reading and the nature of literature itself. Bringing together ideas from law, literature, visual art, film and much more, this innovative and deftly written book asks us to see modernism not as a foreclosed literary period, but as the herald of our own media-saturated world. In the process, he reveals that the ever-shifting concept of obscenity still secretly shapes our basic definitions of literature and art. --Sean Latham, Walter Endowed Chair of English, University of Tulsa