Let us not waste our time in idle discourse!

Images from the original ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN by Mark Twain.

This is an interesting account of a professor and her students. She is a black professor with all white students, and this is a journal-like essay that discusses her experience with, as the title says, “Teaching the N-Word”. This is relevant both to my Temple FYW class as well as my Rowan Experiencing Literature class— we are each beginning to read a novel that includes this word many times. Huck Finn and Kindred.

Quoted from the article:

Everyone at Cherry Hill agrees that the controversy brought their community together. The strengthened relationship between the minority community and the schools is “one of the best things that came out of this,” says the same parent who worried at first that there would be a “firestorm.”

This is an article from 2003 about racism and Huck Finn. The people whom is article is about argue that the use of the “n-word” in Twain’s classic make it inappropriate for a high school classroom. Since many of us came to the conclusion that the book should be left as is and also in the curriculum during our first conversation in class, I am curious how we might react to this article. Do we think that the individuals that are featured in this article have a point? What of the other side of this debate, that no matter what, the word is offensive?

Quoted from the article, which is about the Huckleberry Finn: Hipster Edition, which can be found in .pdf version here.

​Richard Grayson, a Brooklyn writer and editor, has gone above and beyond angry or satirical tweets in response to Publishers Weekly’s announcement that they would release version of Huckleberry Finn(and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) without the word “nigger.” He’s released a whole new version of the book, entitled The Hipster Huckleberry Finn, which replaces every instance of the offending word with “hipster.” Seriously.

This project got an overwhelming amount of funding. At first I chuckled, thinking this was an article from The Onion, but when I clicked the link I realized it was a project. It’s been successfully funded, and I’m not sure if it’s been printed/distributed yet, but it’s interesting. The comments that explain the project border on hilarious as well.

This NY times article from January takes the opinions of a variety of scholars and lines them up to discuss the controversy that Alan Gribben’s version of Huck Finn started earlier this year.

This was news at the end of last/beginning of this year. A publishing house edited Twain’s fiction to remove its racial epithets, and controversy ensued. This NPR interview with the editor of the volume that started the controversy is insightful and worth a listen.

There’s a good comprehensive selection of information on and about Twain’s Huck Finn at this site. In case anyone is writing their paper on the novel we’ll be reading in EL or in case anyone is interested, check the site out.

Especially if you don’t have the copy that I specified in our syllabus, you should look at the site because they have the illustrations that were featured in the original text— they’re classic. If you click on “Illustrations” and then click on the link “Gallery of Illustrations”, they’re listed by chapter there.