Editing Sophie's Choice (novel) (section)

==Reception and controversies==
===Awards and recognition===
{{expand section|with a much more full, source-based summary of the awards and recognition garnered by the work, and by the author for this work | small = no | date = May 2023}}
''Sophie's Choice'' won the U.S. [[National Book Award for Fiction]] in 1980.<ref name=nba1980>Weil, Robert (2009) "Sophie's Choice by William Styron, 1980" at ''National Book Association'' [Fiction Blog, August 14], see {{cite web |url=https://www.nbafictionblog.org/nba-winning-books-blog/1980-5.html |title=1980 - www.nbafictionblog.org - National Book Awards Fiction Winners |access-date=2015-11-08 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304031814/http://www.nbafictionblog.org/nba-winning-books-blog/1980-5.html |archive-date=2016-03-04 }}, accessed 7 November 2015.</ref><ref group = "note">This was the 1980 [[National Book Award for Fiction#1980 to 1989|award for hardcover general Fiction]], see [https://www.nationalbook.org/awards-prizes/national-book-awards-1980 National Book awards website]. The [[National Book Awards#History|National Book Awards]] there given for both hardcover and paperback in most categories from 1980 to 1983 and for [[List of winners of the National Book Award#Miscellaneous 1980 to 1985|multiple fiction categories]], especially in 1980. See {{cite web|access-date=2016-12-22|title=1980 National Book Awards Winners and Finalists, The National Book Foundation|url=https://www.nationalbook.org/awards-prizes/national-book-awards-1980|website=www.nationalbook.org}}</ref> Much later, in 2002, Styron would receive the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation's Witness to Justice Award.<ref name=":0" />

===Critical reception===
{{expand section|with a much more full, source-based summary of its critical reception, beyond the generally unrepresentative Gardner review | small = no | date = May 2023}}
In his review of the novel in the ''New York Times,'' [[John Gardner (American writer)|John Gardner]] takes it as an example of [[Southern Gothic]],{{dubious|date = May 2023}} writing that:<blockquote>[It] is a splendidly written, thrilling book, a philosophical novel on the most important subject of the 20th century. If it is not, for me, a hands-down literary masterpiece, the reason is that, in transferring the form of the Southern Gothic to this vastly larger subject, Styron has been unable to get rid of or even noticeably tone down those qualities—some superficial, some deep—in the Southern Gothic that have always made Yankees squirm.<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1979/05/27/archives/a-novel-of-evil-styron.html|title=A Novel of Evil|last=Gardner|first=John|date=1979-05-27|work=The New York Times|language=en}}</ref></blockquote>

===Controversies===
====At publication====
''Sophie's Choice'' generated significant controversy at time of its publication. Sylvie Mathé notes that ''Sophie's Choice'', which she refers to as a "highly controversial novel", appeared in press in the year following the broadcast of the [[NBC]] miniseries ''[[Holocaust (miniseries)|Holocaust]]'' (1978), engendering a period in American culture where "a newly-raised consciousness of the Holocaust was becoming a forefront public issue."<ref name=Mathe04/> Mathé says:
{{blockquote|sign=|source=|Styron's ideological and narrative choices in his framing of a novel touching upon the "limit events" of Auschwitz, considered by many to lie beyond the realm of the imagination… spurred a polemic… which, twenty-five years later, is far from having died down.<ref name=Mathe04/>}}
(By "limit event" the author is referring to the nature of, and magnitude and violence of acts in, the Holocaust, characteristics of that "event" that challenged the civilizing tendencies of and the foundations of legitimacy for the moral and political fabric that defined its affected communities.<ref name = LimitEventNote>Here, paraphrasing Simone Gigliotti, see following. The reference to a "limit event" (synonymous with "limit case" and "limit situation") is to a concept deriving at least from the early 1990s—Saul Friedländer, in introducing his ''Probing the Limits of Representation,'' quotes David Carroll, who refers to the Holocaust as "this limit case of knowledge and feeling". It is a concept that can be understood to mean an event or related circumstance or practice that is "of such magnitude and profound violence" that it "rupture[s]... otherwise normative foundations of legitimacy and... civilising tendencies that underlie... political and moral community" (the later, oft-cited formulation of Simone Gigliotti). 
* For Friedländer, see {{cite book |last1=Friedländer |first1=Saul |author-link1=Saul Friedländer |year=1992 |chapter=Introduction |editor1-last=Friedländer |editor1-first=Saul |title=Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "final Solution" |url=https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0674707664 |location=Cambridge, MA, USA |publisher=Harvard University Press |pages=1–21 (esp. 6) |isbn=0-674-70766-4 |access-date=7 November 2015}} 
* For Carroll, see {{cite book |contributor-last= Carroll |contributor-first=David |date=1990 |contribution=The Memory of Devastation and the Responsibilities of Thought: 'And let's not talk about that' [Foreword] |last=Lyotard |first=Jean François |author-link=Jean François Lyotard |title= Heidegger and "the Jews" |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9Nd1XHpMtQUC |language=en |translator1=Andreas Michel |translator2=Mark S. Roberts |pages=vii-xxix |isbn=0-8166-1857-7 |location=Minneapolis, MN |publisher=University of Minnesota Press |quote=Quote: [T]his indeterminacy has special significance when it comes to the Shoah, this limit case of knowledge and feeling, in terms of which all such systems of belief and thought, all forms of literary and artistic expression, seem irrelevant or criminal.}} 
* For Gigliotti, see {{cite journal |author=Gigliotti, Simone |date=June 2003 |title=Unspeakable Pasts as Limit Events: The Holocaust, Genocide, and the Stolen Generations |journal=Australian Journal of Politics and History |volume=49 |number=2 |pages=164–181, esp. 164 |publisher=Wiley-Blackwell |doi=10.1111/1467-8497.00302 |quote=Quote: A 'limit event' is an event or practice of such magnitude and profound violence that its effects rupture the otherwise normative foundations of legitimacy and so-called civilising tendencies that underlie the constitution of political and moral community.}}</ref>)

The controversy to which Mathé is specifically referring arises from a thematic analysis which—in apparent strong consensus (e.g., see Rosenfeld's 1979 work, "The Holocaust According to William Styron"<ref name=Rosenfeld79/>)—has Styron, through the novel, his interviews, and essays:
* Acknowledging Jewish suffering during [[the Holocaust]], while attempting to reorient public perception away from [[Nazi war crimes]] and [[genocide]]s being solely aimed against the Jews and towards also acknowledging the experiences of Slavs, anti-Nazi Christians, political [[dissident]]s, and the disabled (hence Sophie's ethnicity and Catholic upbringing); that is, it has him insisting on seeing Auschwitz in particular in more universal terms as "a murderous thrust against 'the entire human family.'"<ref name=Mathe04/><ref name=Rosenfeld79/> Styron further extends his argument, again with controversy:
* Proposing that this more general view of the barbarism of Auschwitz (and in particular the fact that Slavic peoples and Christians were also caught up in its program of forced labour and extermination) disproves the unsupported/irrational/bigoted idea of universal Christian [[collective guilt]] and challenges historical arguments blaming all previous Christian anti-Semitism as the real cause of the Holocaust, and 
* Suggesting that concentration camps, in using slave labour, justifies the comparison of Nazi war crimes (e.g., in the writings of Rubenstein) with the [[Slavery in the United States|American institution of slavery]] and allowed the latter to be viewed as the less inhumane institution of the two.<ref name=Mathe04/><ref name=Rosenfeld79/>

Speaking of Styron's views as set forth in the novel and his nonfiction work, Rosenfeld refers to them as "revisionist views" that "culminate in ''Sophie's Choice''" with an aim to "take the Holocaust out of Jewish and Christian history and place it within a generalized history of evil",<ref name=Rosenfeld79/>{{rp|44}} and it is this specific revisionist thrust that is the substance of the novel's initial and persisting ability to engender controversy.<ref name=Mathe04/>

====Other aspects of global controversy====
''Sophie's Choice'' was banned by the [[Goskomizdat]] agency as part of [[censorship in the Soviet Union]], and was [[Censorship in Communist Poland|likewise banned by the censors]] in the Communist [[People's Republic of Poland]] for "its unflinching portrait of Polish anti-Semitism" in the interwar [[Second Polish Republic]] and in the postwar [[Soviet Bloc]].<ref>{{cite book |author=Sirlin, Rhoda |author2=West, James L. W. III | date = 2007 | title = Sophie's Choice: A Contemporary Casebook | location = Newcastle UK | publisher = Cambridge Scholars Publishing  | page = ix | url = http://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/60485 | access-date = 5 Jan 2013 | quote = }}</ref>

''Sophie's Choice'' was [[censorship in South Africa|banned by censors]] working for the government of [[South Africa under apartheid]] in November 1979, for being a sexually explicit work.<ref>Index on censorship, Vol 9, no 2.{{clarify|date = May 2023}}{{full citation needed|date = May 2023}}</ref>{{full citation needed|date = May 2023}} It has also been banned in some high schools in the United States. For instance, the book was pulled from the [[La Mirada High School]] Library in California by the Norwalk-La Mirada High School District in 2002 because of a parent's complaint about its sexual content.<ref name="LAT">{{cite news | last = Helmand | first = Duke |title = Students Fight for 'Sophie's Choice' | newspaper = [[The Los Angeles Times]] |date = 2001-12-22 | url = https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-dec-22-me-17211-story.html | access-date = February 25, 2016}}</ref> However, a year after students had protested and the [[American Civil Liberties Union]] (ACLU) had sent a letter to the school district requesting that the district reverse its actions, students were again given access to the book in the school library.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.aclu-wa.org/library_files/A%20History%20of%20Fighting%20Censorship.pdf|title=A History of Fighting Censorship|publisher=[[American Civil Liberties Union]]|year=2006|access-date=2009-10-07|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101223201015/http://www.aclu-wa.org/library_files/A%20History%20of%20Fighting%20Censorship.pdf|archive-date=2010-12-23}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://sshl.ucsd.edu/banned/books.html|title=Banned Books Week: September 25-October 2|date=September 22, 2004|publisher=[[UCSD]]|access-date=2009-10-07|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080511235655/http://sshl.ucsd.edu/banned/books.html|archive-date=May 11, 2008}}</ref>