N-word deleted from Twain classics

[followsthewolf]

Your parents were, indeed, exceptional in their desire to help you understand the complexities of classic literature.

You were/are lucky to have been reared in such an atmosphere. Most of us were/are not so fortunate.

Some of us (as it was in my case) had terrific high school teachers and/or college professors who were passionate about teaching the classics.

Lots never cared about or spent any time trying to learn what was in those books.

Some still don't, and still have no desire to learn much, preferring to suck up opinions second-hand, much like small birds that depend on regurgitated worms for nutrition.

Sad.

[Palehorse]

Your parents were, indeed, exceptional in their desire to help you understand the complexities of classic literature.

You were/are lucky to have been reared in such an atmosphere. Most of us were/are not so fortunate.

Some of us (as it was in my case) had terrific high school teachers and/or college professors who were passionate about teaching the classics.

Lots never cared about or spent any time trying to learn what was in those books.

Some still don't, and still have no desire to learn much, preferring to suck up opinions second-hand, much like small birds that depend on regurgitated worms for nutrition.

Sad.

Yeah, I recognized that later on in life. Both of my parents graduated HS and dad had some college but never obtained a degree, but both emphasized education in our lives. And when it came to my own children, only then did I come to realize just how huge my parents contributions were. . . and come to appreciate them. Imagine my chagrin at never recognizing it before that! 

In the suburban / Chicago educational system we went through, it was sadly much the same way; some were great, but most were marginal at best. But, I had the great fortune of having parents that truly cared, and a few very exceptional teachers along the way as well. Especially in HS. Those men and women had a major impact upon my life, and it resonates to this very day in most cases. (And provided a bar against which I measured every single one of my children's teachers too).

I always held contempt toward those teachers that coasted though. I got "A's" in their courses, but I always felt cheated by them. I left their classes feeling unfulfilled and with no outlet for my questions and thoughts.  I left hungering for more information on the topic(s) and at one point actually got sent to the deans office for taking the teacher to task right in the classroom during final exams, for their lethargy.  (It's a damned shame when a high school student can actually arrive at the conclusion that they know more about a particular subject than the teacher, and that they could do a more efficient and effective job at teaching it). 

To this very day I am greatly motivated by the learning process, and I hunger for more. Had I had the means and funding I would still be in college and working on a doctorate or two. Or perhaps teaching myself. Nothing invigorates me more than a young person's thirst and enthusiasm for learning. . . Perhaps that is why I find myself addicted to this forum???? 

[Palehorse]

Well, if nothing else I am inspired by the fact that those much more enlightened than I, and respected, are also very much frustrated by this, and that we share the very same reasons for it as well!

P.C. insult to a Mark Twain classic
By Ron Powers, Special to CNN
January 6, 2011 4:58 p.m. EST



Editor's note: Ron Powers is the author of "Mark Twain: A Life" (Free Press, 2005).
(CNN) -- The vapid, smiley-faced effrontery of it corrodes the foundations of respect for American literature.
And the effrontery is the least of it.
NewSouth Books' announcement that it is bringing out a desecrated edition of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" -- in which faceless editors at this distinctly vanilla-flavored publisher will have excised every one of Mark Twain's brilliantly seditious employments of the evil word "******" -- has caught the fleeting notice of bloggers and pundits around the country.
The fleeting notice, let us stipulate. Most commentators have contented themselves with armchair witticisms: Next thing you know, they'll be painting Snuggies on the great European nudes and calling Othello a "nice man" instead of a Moor -- that sort of thing.
Keith Staskiewicz of EW.com, in a post reprinted on this website, actually refers to Twain's novel as a "product" and yawningly remarks, "It's unfortunate, but is it really any more catastrophic than a TBS-friendly re-edit of 'The Godfather,' you down-and-dirty melon farmer?"
Yes, Keith, it is. It really is.
It gets worse: The progressive Mother Jones' blogger Kevin Drum considers the announcement and goes positively limp. "(T)he problem with 'Huckleberry Finn,' " he writes, "is that, like it or not, most high school teachers only have two choices these days: teach a bowdlerized version or don't teach it at all." If bowdlerization is inevitable, in other words, lie back and enjoy it.
But why should this evisceration of America's greatest novel -- let's dispense with that quaint term "bowdlerization" -- be inevitable? Who is NewSouth Books, and by what tradition, by what authority, should its editors be forgiven for disfiguring one of the most challenging, and instructive works of art ever published?
The "who" of NewSouth: It is a Montgomery, Alabama-based publisher of books with ingratiating titles such as "Alabama, One Big Front Porch," whose grandmotherly author clucks on about how life in the state has always been about folks gatherin' on summer nights to tell tales and to talk family. Selma notwithstanding.
And "The Other Side of Montgomery: Growing Up White in the Birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement," a comfy, Haley Barbour-esque memoir about the "casual neighborliness" of the town in which Rosa Parks risked her life for a dignified ride on a bus.
The question of NewSouth's "authority" leads us into far more provocative territory. The publisher has couched its announcement of the "******"-emancipated "Huckleberry Finn" in divertingly unctuous tones.
Its website offers "a word" about the new edition in which it bemoans the original author's use of "hurtful epithets" (including "injun"), which NewBooks has helpfully replaced with "less offensive words." And it cites the wise, enabling counsel of the scholar, Alan Gribben, who "compassionately" urged the publisher along its revisionist course.
Gribben was also quoted in a Publishers Weekly article in which he explained, "After a number of talks, I was sought out by local teachers, and to a person they said we would love to teach ('Tom Sawyer') and 'Huckleberry Finn,' but we feel we can't do it anymore. In the new classroom, it's really not acceptable."
That particular line of apology, as it happens, was brilliantly countered in the December 30 edition of the New York Daily News by the eminent Mark Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Responding to an entirely separate attack on the legitimacy of racial slurs in the mouths of Twain's less-than-heroic characters, Fishkin wrote:
"It's ironic ... that the principle (invoked) to ban Mark Twain's anti-racist classic -- that books filled with the N-word shouldn't be taught -- would also ban from the nation's classrooms many of the greatest and most inspiring works by black writers in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Cutting n-word from Twain not censorship
"The N-word is key to critiques of racism found in nonfiction from Frederick Douglass' "Narrative," to W.E.B. Du Bois' "Souls of Black Folk," to Richard Wright's "Black Boy," to James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son," to "The Autobiography of Malcolm X."
Fishkin concludes: "To expose a racist society for what it is, you have to show racists as they are, speaking as they would speak. ... Taking one of the greatest American anti-racist novels out of schools because the persistence of racism today makes the book's language painful is wrongheaded and counterproductive."
Is Twain's inspired irony really so hard to grasp? And are today's public school teachers really so enfeebled and so intimidated that they cannot teach it?
The timing is unfortunate. This year is the 150th anniversary of South Carolina's secession from the Union, which ignited the Civil War. This anniversary has been marked thus far by elaborate celebrations -- balls, parades, theatrical re-enactments -- celebrating the great event ("an act of tremendous political courage," a ball sponsor from the Sons of Confederate Veterans called it) and by even more elaborate denials, contrary to overwhelming historical evidence, that the rebellion had anything whatsoever to do with slavery.
Denials and other lies, amplified enough, congeal into contaminated legitimacy -- "fake reality," in Leo Rosten's phrase. Whitewash washes white not only its target but, over time, any memory of the target. That is the purpose of whitewash.
Denying the role of slavery in triggering the Civil War and denying Twain's insight that "******" was prevalent and dehumanizing enough in that era to irradiate his most enduring anti-racist literature feed into the same polluted basin: the spreading pool of disinformation about America's past.
Whether these assaults on history are intentional or merely fatuous hardly matters. The people involved, in both instances, should know better.
Oh, and, sorry: It is not enough that NewSouth Books plans to replace the N-word with "slave." Huck's companion Jim is a slave -- no getting around that. But the latter word, unlike the former, has lost most of its emotional impact in this century and a half after abolition.
Call me a cynic. But I know this territory. I've been there before. We've all been there before.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/01/06/powers.huck.finn/index.html?hpt=C1

[followsthewolf]

And that's why, many years ago when I started teaching, I taught The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer exactly as they were written -- as a satire on the Antebellum South and an accurate representation of the deeply entrenched racism of the time.

The resistance I encountered was surprising, given the northern location and what seemed to be the prevailing attitude of equality within the community.

Nevertheless, the vestiges of racial attitude even there were surprising to me at the time, probably because of my youth and being naive. Today, I would not be surprised at all.

[Sandy Eggo]

It's all sad. It's very sad. I'm beginning to lOse hope for the future of our country. Thinking isn't valued anymore.

It seems like an off topic comment,but it's not. How many times has reading caused you to make comparisons, do analysis, or thirst to know more and understand? For me, almost everytime. The classics never fail to inspire me. I get on these reading jags and can't stop until the thought stream is played out.

So now, let's dumb them down, censor them so there's nothing left to think about. Who needs to be offended? Shocked? Appaulled? Enthused? Encouraged? Challenged? Certainly emotion can't inspire the love of reading?

I'm on a tangent and I'm sorry. This just really upsets me.

[Palehorse]

It's all sad. It's very sad. I'm beginning to lOse hope for the future of our country. Thinking isn't valued anymore.

It seems like an off topic comment,but it's not. How many times has reading caused you to make comparisons, do analysis, or thirst to know more and understand? For me, almost everytime. The classics never fail to inspire me. I get on these reading jags and can't stop until the thought stream is played out.

So now, let's dumb them down, censor them so there's nothing left to think about. Who needs to be offended? Shocked? Appaulled? Enthused? Encouraged? Challenged? Certainly emotion can't inspire the love of reading?

I'm on a tangent and I'm sorry. This just really upsets me.

I don't think your post is a tangent at all, I believe it goes to the very core of why this action is wrong and why it is indeed one of the worst choices our educators can make surrounding the enlightenment of our future leaders.

I whole-heartedly agree with you on every single point you make. It is a key attribute of what everyone who is opposing this action is saying! 

[followsthewolf]

The fact that classics cause one to be offended, shocked, appalled, encouraged, challenged, etc,  is one of the primary reasons they are classics.

The emotional response that triggers thinking is the reason they were written in the first place.

Hang in there, Sandy, the Philistines haven't pushed all cogent reasoning out of this country yet.

Not as long as threads like this exist.

[Palehorse]

The fact that classics cause one to be offended, shocked, appalled, encouraged, challenged, etc,  is one of the primary reasons they are classics.

The emotional response that triggers thinking is the reason they were written in the first place.

Hang in there, Sandy, the Philistines haven't pushed all cogent reasoning out of this country yet.

Not as long as threads like this exist.

Exactly my friend! Spot on!