Huckleberry Finn

[bordelais7]

"*uck Finn" would have made a much better thread title. You must be kicking yourself now for not using it.

 

[bordelais7]

I teach high-school math at a local community college. For my students, I would probably recommend the sanitized version of Huckleberry Finn over the original, especially if there were clear notations on where the changes where made.

I'm really struggling to understand why. You think college students are too stupid to realize that language and accepted use evolves? Explain yourself, sir.

 

[VINYLONE]

NOTE TO ALL POSTERS: It doesn't matter if you "label" it or include a warning that the content may not be "G-Rated" - - if the image or video contains language that the profanity filter would replace with ***** if it were in a written post, then it does not belong in your post. The image/video will be removed and you will get an infraction.

and what did you want, Get Down? Perhaps I should have signed it: XOXO - Moe - or somehow tried to make it all warm and fuzzy for you?

And in case anyone is wondering, there were a number of words in the video in addition to the N-word that violated the profanity rule.

Wow Moe! Spicy. I likey.

Get Down, please GTFO. Don't come at my girl like that.

 

[One Brow]

I'm really struggling to understand why. You think college students are too stupid to realize that language and accepted use evolves? Explain yourself, sir.

I think students ready for a college curriculum can make the difference, and should be taught it. Perhaps you note how that is different from what I said.

Walk before you can run.

 

[Scat]

I'm really struggling to understand why. You think college students are too stupid to realize that language and accepted use evolves? Explain yourself, sir.

I think students ready for a college curriculum can make the difference, and should be taught it. Perhaps you note how that is different from what I said.

Walk before you can run.

One Brow is being a smart *** because I forgot an R in the poll question.

 

[LogGrad98]

[thread derail]

Did you know the profanity filter blanks out the technical term for solid bodily waste (***** rhymes with species) but does not filter out "poop", which is a slang/colloquial term.

Strange that scientific terms are viewed as profanity.

[/thread derail]

 

[One Brow]

One Brow is being a smart *** because I forgot an R in the poll question.

I didn't notice a missing "R".

I would have agreed with "Yes, getting the kids students to focus on the plot and themes of the novel is more important having an exact replication of the vocabulary."

For that matter, I would even have agreed with "No, teaching students to look past the percularities of culture is a valuable goal" more than either of the options you offered.

To me, this decision needs to be about the students, not the words or the book.

 

[PearlWatson]

LOL - but not true, my kids had excerpts from the Bible as part of the curriculum in Lit and/or History classes at a public high school

Which excerpts?

 

[LogGrad98]

Censoring any work of fiction that was this transformational for our country at the time is a failure of huge proportions. It is a part of our cultural heritage and as such needs to be read in its entirety. Works like this help us put cultural norms and history as it is taught in schools into some kind of real-world context. Often fiction says far more about the culture in a given point in time than hisorians ever can, especially since "history" as a subject tends to be sanitized and biased somewhat (remember the victors write the histories).

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana

This is one way we remember the past. Sometimes it is disturbing or offensive to our sensibilities today. That should actually be lauded to show how far we have come as a society, but to pretend we were never "there" to begin with is misleading at best, destructive at worst.

 

[Scat]

Censoring any work of fiction that was this transformational for our country at the time is a failure of huge proportions. It is a part of our cultural heritage and as such needs to be read in its entirety. Works like this help us put cultural norms and history as it is taught in schools into some kind of real-world context. Often fiction says far more about the culture in a given point in time than hisorians ever can, especially since "history" as a subject tends to be sanitized and biased somewhat (remember the victors write the histories).

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana

This is one way we remember the past. Sometimes it is disturbing or offensive to our sensibilities today. That should actually be lauded to show how far we have come as a society, but to pretend we were never "there" to begin with is misleading at best, destructive at worst.

This is just silly talk. We should get rid of all memory of books such as Mein Kampf, erase the Nazi regime from our memory banks and get on with life. The sooner we forget about this nonsense the sooner we'll be all happy.

 

[Surely]

This is just silly talk. We should get rid of all memory of books such as Mein Kampf, erase the Nazi regime from our memory banks and get on with life. The sooner we forget about this nonsense the sooner we'll be all happy.

You should attend a history class in Japan. Talk about leaving a few things out... Hopefully America will soon be able to whitewash our past as well. No sense in teaching the kids what really happened.

 

[sirkickyass]

Interesting article about both this and the reading of the U.S. Constitution this week that omitted references to slavery.

WHEN the new House of Representatives convened on Thursday, the Republican leadership kept its promise to start the session by reading the text of the Constitution aloud. This break from Congressional tradition had a polemical purpose: Representative Robert Goodlatte, the Virginia Republican who came up with the idea, remarked that “lots of my constituents have said that Congress has gone beyond its powers granted in the Constitution.”

If the reading was meant to be a win for originalism, however, it stumbled out of the gate, over the text of Article I, Section 2. This deals with the apportionment of House seats among the states, which is said to be based on “the whole number of free persons” and “three-fifths of all other persons.” Rather than draw attention to this infamous euphemism for slaves, the Congressional readers decided to omit those portions, on the grounds that they had been superseded by the 14th Amendment.

It just so happened this conspicuous omission came days after a small publisher, NewSouth Books, announced a new edition of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” that will replace its uses of the word “******” with “slave.” Here, again, was a historic text clashing with contemporary sensibilities, and forced to submit.

Taken together, the two cases show the comedy of euphemism: trying to distract us from something ugly only makes the ugliness harder to miss. To the book’s new editor, the Twain scholar Alan Gribben, “slave” is less offensive than “******”; to the Constitution’s drafters, “all other persons” was less offensive than “slave.” By refusing to utter even that legalism, the House showed that euphemism can end only in embarrassed silence.

The censored edition of “Huckleberry Finn” has been loudly condemned. Certainly, as a writer, I see the strength of all the arguments against tinkering with the original, not least because it would be a terrible precedent — start eliminating everything offensive in literary history, and you’ll have little left. But once I returned to the actual novel, I began to feel torn, because I could imagine the effect that its deluge of epithets would have on a young reader, especially a young black reader. (Open the book to the passage in the second chapter that begins, “Strange ******* would stand with their mouths open,” and see if you would be able to read it to a room full of ninth graders.)

“Huckleberry Finn” was intended, of course, as an attack on racism. In its most famous scene, Huck hides the runaway slave Jim from a party of slave-hunters, and then feels guilty for having done so. “I knowed very well I had done wrong,” he says, though the reader, and Twain, know he has done right. It’s a searching demonstration of the way conscience is not just innate but also learned, and how confusing it can be to do right in a society dedicated to wrong — the same kinds of questions that bedeviled Hannah Arendt at the Eichmann trial.

Yet all those racial epithets are a reminder that, when Twain wrote it, the audience he had in mind — the America for which he wrote — was segregated. He did not worry about constantly writing “******,” because he was writing about blacks, not for them. And for many readers, encountering classic literature means sometimes finding yourself excluded, or insulted, in this way. For blacks reading Twain, certainly, but also for Jews reading Shakespeare or Dickens, and for women reading, say, Plato (among countless others).

But the books we cherish, which deserve the name of classics, feel essentially humane to us, despite their limitations, even their bigotry. “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not,” W. E. B. DuBois said. We feel that the exclusion of whole classes of humanity from the author’s imagined audience — which means, from his idea of the fully human — is due to ignorance or carelessness; that if he were to think and feel more freely, more deeply, he would acknowledge that all people are equally human.

This is also the promise of American history, and above all of the Constitution. Unlike Twain’s novel, that classic American text was written in the expectation that it would be corrected. And it needed correction, or amendment, for the same essential reason: the framers’ imagination of the people they led was not full enough. It took a devastating civil war, whose sesquicentennial we are now observing, to revise the Constitution in the direction of justice. When the House readers decided to skip the parts of the Constitution that reveal its original limitations, they were minimizing that history, pretending that our founding document was flawless from the beginning.

No, Congress may not go “beyond its powers granted in the Constitution,” as Representative Goodlatte insisted. But to believe that American institutions were ever perfect makes it too easy to believe that they are perfect now. Both assumptions, one might say, are sins against the true spirit of the Constitution, which demands that we keep reimagining our way to a more perfect union.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/08/opinion/08kirsch.html?_r=1&ref=opinion