What the heck where these SLAVES thinking?

>>You never read Huck Finn did you.

Not that I remember.

Go read it. Now. RIGHT FUCKING NOW.

Also that explains a lot...

edited 25th Mar '11 12:45:20 PM by Aondeug

lol no im in class now

You can still get unmodified versions something I said earlier. You're all acting as if the government is banning the book when it's far from that.

edited 25th Mar '11 12:46:22 PM by BalloonFleet

Go read Tom Sawyer while you're at it, it was a funnier book. But no seriously, you can't say much about Twain's writing in a certain book if you haven't read it yet.

It's funny, I don't mind the alterations to the songs in works like The Mikado yet messing with Huck annoys me. Though, I too was lucky to grow up in a school district that kept the text intact, and it was used to teach the culture and attitudes of the time, so that's probably why.

I made a more general statement on old classics actually, not specifically on Mark Twain writings. e.g. people are making a lot of drama because it has the word 'nigger' in it.

edited 25th Mar '11 12:50:13 PM by BalloonFleet

You have an interesting way not to talk about books you didn't read.

i was referring to

edited 25th Mar '11 12:51:50 PM by BalloonFleet

Then they need to at least let children know that it is not the original version. I mean it's not even the same book when the impact has been changed along with the text.

The drama comes from the fact that it's altering the work of a famous writer. A work famous for its message, as well as the controversy it stirs up. Altering it is seen as giving into that controversy. Admittedly it gets into Serious Business territory, but that's literature for ya.

Yes you can still get unedited copies. Still the book is being banned from schools and many times the copies the schools do get are edited. Reading Huck Finn in class is a thing. It really is. We had an English class that was tied to our history class. Huck Finn and the lessons done on it were probably the most interesting we had in that class and the ones that left the biggest impact on more than a few of us.

That it's banned from school curriculum because people miss the point is just sad. It doesn't say good things about people. It really doesn't. It says that these people can't take the time to carefully read and understand the very obvious point. That isn't good. They can't see past a word. They can't see the context. They only see the word and give it more power than the context.

If you are going to teach with one of those edited copies at least make it very clear that it is edited.

And you're right, you can find unmodified texts in school systems, but those are fairly rare.

It sounds like what's happening here is actually Bowdlerization—the changing of the text so that places such as schools, would be less likely to ban the text, and thus more kids would be able to access it.

edited 25th Mar '11 1:08:06 PM by Ratix

I loved that bit. It was just...wow. It was a powerful thing. Twain was one hell of a writer.

Shiiiiiit

Man the shit brought tears to my eyes. Manly manly tears. I was like "..." cause I don't talk that much irl and I was alone.

It's 2011 and we're still pussy-footing around about this.

@Ratix I never liked that part and I still don't.

Shame.

Facepalm They're completely missing the point of the book.

I'm starting to see the popularity of the Fantastic Racism trope—directly addressing an unreal problem in such a way as to indirectly address a real problem is actually easier at this point than directly addressing a real problem and weathering the backlash.

I'm kinda baffled by the whole Huckleberry Finn censorship thing.

I mean, when I was in high school my teachers allowed me to use the H.P. Lovecraft text The Call Of Cthulhu as an English text to be studied despite it being blatantly racist (LOL "hybrid spawn" and "mulattoes") because my teachers kind of suspected just looking at me that I was the sort who didn't go around using the N word out of context a lot. This was probably because I was not a rap fan at the time, also because my English teachers at my school despite having a rigid structure to work with made the best of what the HSC syllabus had to offer.

I would actually argue that H.P. Lovecraft should be taught in conjunction with To Kill A Mockingbird just to get across how fearful some people really were of the African American population. Because erasing the N words from Lovecraft even though he INTENDED to be a racist kind of whitewashes, as it were, the source of some of his ideas about horror. It's not the black people that probably scared him at all, but what they represented to his privileged middle class male self that probably spooked him something awful.

"Ten little niggers" is also a story about elementary subtraction that has rather little to do with precisely who's falling down on the way to the market and loses little by changing it — as opposed to a sweeping story whose entire point revolves around the damage done by that word and the mindset behind it.

edited 26th Mar '11 1:07:02 AM by Pykrete