Wednesday, January 5, 2011

"Sanitized" Huckleberry Finn: Thoughts??




Follow this link to a story about an English professor who has proposed a "sanitized" version of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn as a way of overcoming the traditional banning of this book, thereby making it more accessible to more readers.

On the one hand, this would get the book in more people's hands. On the other hand, some might say that this "whitewashes" the history of racial tension in U.S. history.

What do you think??

6 comments:

  1. I'm really confused as to what they are trying to do. If they are replacing the 'N-word' with 'the devil', they are categorizing African American people during the time as people of the devil or devil worshippers, which most, if not all, were not. If anything, it just adds more controversy to the already hotly debated topic. Honestly, the word in question was a colloquial term in Mississippi during the time, and as Mark Twain has shown through all the dialogue in the book, he wanted to preserve this language. Changing it changes the meaning of the work entirely. The point was to show how the African Americans were thought of at the time and the word carries that thought.
    I know that it is still an extremely sensative issue, but Huckleberry Finn is an asset to literature that shouldn't be banned just because of a word used commonly during that time.

    But, I don't know exactly what they are proposing.

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  2. I believe the proposal is to replace the n-word with "slave" actually. That would be less pejorative than "devil," but it still raises questions about shifting the tone of representing the racist discourse of a period in U.S. history. The proposal also raises the broader question of what are the benefits and losses of changing a literary or other artistic work to fit social decorum and what right anyone has to make such changes...

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  4. I think the proposal of replacing the N-word just makes the presence of the the word more pronounced. Not only that but I also think by replacing the word, it could possibly act as a way to erase the racist comments and problems the African Americans had to endure. Perhaps attempting to hide the dark happenings that had happened in the past...

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  5. That's an interesting idea, Cindy. So, do you think this "sanitized" edition should get published too and that schools/libraries should carry both as a way of actually highlighting the matter?

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  6. I believe that in the sense if both editions were to be taught and kept in the libraries it would not a bad idea to contrast the two. However, the publication of the "sanitized" edition was proposed to replace the original version, and since that is the case the proposer and the supporters of the "sanitized" version would not agree to the comparison/ existence of both versions in school that could place them into a bad light since it could bring into question the possibility the not so positive reasons for the proposal.

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