Posted on 01/04/2011 5:24:19 PM PST by Borges
Saying they want to publish a version that won't be banned from some schools because of its language, two scholars are editing Mark Twain's classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to eliminate uses of the "N" word and replace it with "slave," Publishers Weekly writes.
The edition, from NewSouth Books, will also shorten an offensive reference to Native Americans.
As PW says, "for decades, [Huckleberry Finn] has been disappearing from grade school curricula across the country, relegated to optional reading lists, or banned outright, appearing again and again on lists of the nation's most challenged books, and all for its repeated use of a single, singularly offensive word."
One of the scholars, Alan Gribben of Auburn University, tells PW that "this is not an effort to render Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn colorblind. ... Race matters in these books. It's a matter of how you express that in the 21st century." (The edited Huck Finn will be included in a volume with Tom Sawyer.)
News of the new edition of Huck Finn has sparked quite a bit of comment on Twitter, where "Huckleberry Finn" is a trending topic as this moment. So far, the consensus of the crowd seems to be that it's not a good idea. One interesting comment from that thread:
"Learning the 'N' word from Huckleberry Finn taught me not to use it bc it was improper, so.. why the change?" The new edition, PW says, is due to be published by February. Huckleberry Finn was first published in 1884.
Well, that’s f’ing gay.
And Mark Twain is turning over in his grave.... (Mostly to say; “Kiss my A**”)
“so.. why the change?”
because many “educators” are moronic tools.
I am neither a fan of or a user of the “n” word, but, I fail to see how Huckleberry Finn promotes its use.
It is a book that reflects the South at the time. The “n” word was used, and black people were not generally treated as human beings.
This is not celebrated. It is reported. Huck’s friendship with Jim is put forward as a positive, equal friendship and thus transcends racism in a very positive way.
This book can be well used in the classroom to teach about the former acceptance of racism and its ramifications.
To take the “n” word out dumbs the book down and actually shows the South as that much better than it was in that category.
It’s bitterly ironic that some miseducated critics condemn HUCK FINN as a racist novel, when, in fact, it is a masterful condemnation of slavery. At the end of the story, Huck decides he will not turn Jim into authorities, even though Huck’s culture has convinced him that he will go to hell for freeing a slave. After their river journey, Huck realizes that Jim is a human being too, and Huck decides to risk hell rather than turn in his friend. Read passage below.
I thought till I wore my head sore, but I couldn’t see no way out of the trouble. After all this long journey, and after all we’d done for them scoundrels, here it was all come to nothing, everything all busted up and ruined, because they could have the heart to serve Jim such a trick as that, and make him
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a slave again all his life, and amongst strangers, too, for forty dirty dollars.
Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he’d got to be a slave, and so I’d better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him to tell Miss Watson where he was. But I soon give up that notion for two things: she’d be mad and disgusted at his rascality and ungratefulness for leaving her, and so she’d sell him straight down the river again; and if she didn’t, everybody naturally despises an ungrateful nigger, and they’d make Jim feel it all the time, and so he’d feel ornery and disgraced. And then think of me! It would get all around that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom; and if I was ever to see anybody from that town again I’d be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame. That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide, it ain’t no disgrace. That was my fix exactly. The more I studied about this the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven,whilst I was stealing a poor old woman’s nigger that hadn’t ever done me no harm, and now was showing me there’s One that’s always on the lookout, and ain’t a-going to allow no such miserable doings to go only just so fur and no further, I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared. Well, I tried the best I
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could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn’t so much to blame; but something inside of me kept saying, “There was the Sunday-school, you could a gone to it; and if you’d a done it they’d a learnt you there that people that acts as I’d been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire.”
It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie — I found that out.
So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn’t know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I’ll go and write the letter — and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:
Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send.
HUCK FINN.
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I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking — thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking.
And got to thinking
over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell” — and tore it up.
It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never
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thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.
Too bad. There is no better way to have a kid learn what it was like in America 150 years ago than to have him read HF in its original prose.
Just out of curiosity, is the women-murdering humour a part of it once again?
Huck to be portray’d as happy-go-luck
Komsomol member, Jim as his adoring side kick?
Then it is no longer “Huckleberry Finn,” but has become another book entirely. What a bunch of wusses, and history changers.
Revision of classic, harmless literature? Un-friggin-believable. What’s going to make these libtards stop this insanity? I cherish my copy of the original Mark Twain text.
I read Huck Finn to my boy when he was only five I bet. Left the N-word in there and explained to him it was a naughty word. I think the use of the word portrays the attitude of the times back then, and brings a huge contrast to Huck’s actions and our times today.
Lot of offensive things in Shakespeare too.
They could just rewrite them.
Start with the phrase “The first thing we do is kill all of the lawyers.”
I assume that next we can expect an assault on Joseph Conrad.
WTF?
The N word was used about a thousand times.... And that’s just the first chapter.
What the heck kind of Mark Twain classic do they think they’ll end up with?
Classic case of “Bowdlerism.”
When the Victorians did something similar to Shakespeare’s plays regarding sexual references, it was criticized as censorship.
When moderns do the same thing regarding racial references in Twain, it’s sanctioned for making an important author “palatable” to politically correct tastes.
Yep. A different book that makes that part of history seem less bad than it was. Must be because Democrats want to cover up the fact that they were the party of slavery.
Newspeak!
The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For example, it appeared from the Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother's speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened.
(1984)
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