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Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Journal Entry #19: "The Huck Finn Controversy"

To many, The Adventures if Huckleberry Finn is a classic story of American boyhood and his lesson about the truth behind slavery, to others, its a book that spams the "N-word" uncontrollably and makes it unusable for teaching American Literature. For me, I found it puzzling how just one word would make a countless number of schools ban one of the classics of American Literature. This was until I saw the "60 minutes" special about the censorship of Huckleberry fin and the disturbing power behind the "N-Word."
I understood the intentions of the man who was behind replacing the "N-word" with "slave" for his latest edition of Huckleberry Finn. More schools could use the book and still teach the message in the book about slavery, but does it? I don't think so, at least not to the same extent as the original copy. The use of such a word was not that uncommon back then in the South, and taking that out is like shedding a blanket over a serious problem back then. Alone, the word is just a word, but back then, white slave owners gave that word its true meeting and power as they used their word on their slaves. So taking that word away covers a part if American History that Southern whites and Blacks did want to see.

3 comments:

  1. A little more detail Ehren. Develop more. Also, could you change the black background; the white lettering is hard on the eyes. 4.25/5

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  2. Ehren, I agree with you, I thought that although the publisher was very well-meaning when he wished to remove the N-word, he has violated the sanctity of a classic work of literature when purging the book of that word. Despite all the hurt and anguish that the word has caused, it still needs to be batted around in order to educate people about it.

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  3. I agree with you to the extent that taking the word from the book does take some of the meaning out of it, but one of my arguments was that the word though important does not take the whole meaning out of the book. A person who gets the same lesson on the evils of slavery without hearing the N-word would probably take away the same thing as a person who learned about slavery while hearing it.

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