the "N" word to be removed from Huck Finn

They arent banning the book, quite the opposite, they are proposing to remove an offensive word and PUT IT ON THE CURRICULUM !!!

how can that be possibly be construed as banning a book???

also nobody has said the book cant be read!!!! it cant be read as a book on the curriculum! apart from that you can teach your kids its ok to say "******" at home. they can read the book at home, but they wont have the book in a school. That isnt banning a book thats making the book more widely available by taking the word out. ITS YOU THAT WANTS THE BOOK BANNED because to save your political idea that its ok if kids are educated in the word "******" and like I said before, when you do teach your kid that word add a stack of venom to it so they really do understand exactly what you mean by it when YOU use it!

then again people with literature-hating no brainer arguments like yours, dont need books do they
all they need is the word "******" written in one book forcing it down the throats of children

 

If your next post makes this much sense, I'll just have to change it when I quote you.

 

I can't believe this went on for 25 pages.

The book's not a fun story about kids raising hell, it's a social commentary disguised as a fun story about kids raising hell.

To alter the book serves NO purpose, if you want a fun story about kids raisin hell there's thousands of them that don't say ******, if you want a social commentary then you read the original book.

There is NO excuse for doing this to the book. Other than to make money.

I'm all for copyleft, fair use, and all the rest. But this ain't that.

This is "scholars" using a spell checker to butcher a book. It's not a happy friendly book, and if kids can't take the book, they shouldn't be reading the book.

 

There may be more editions. So? That doesn't make it okay to pass this off as huck finn.

No, people who banned a book have nothing to do with this. You can still get the book, you can still read the book, people WILL still read the book.

Know the fastest way to get people to want to read something? tell them that it's banned, that it's ILLEGAL for them to know the things in that book. They will read it.

Hopefully the whole "we banned the real one, have this, it has the same name on the cover" bullshit gets some kids to go read the real one.

If Ice Cube can say ****** in a way that makes black people look like ignorant douchebags, why can't Mark Twain say ****** in a way that makes one think about the injustice of how ******'s being said? The same black kids who are being protected from the immense pain of reading the word ****** in SUPPORT of the ****** in question(many more educated black people might DEMAND that their kids read it, instead of say "it's painful") go home and listen to Ice Cube say ******, and call their friends ******, and think they're taking something back. Mark Twain did it long before NWA.

 

Ups, my last post really is difficult to understand...sorry about that.
My point is that I don't agree with censorship and with making things seem better and prettier than they are. That's all.

stonk: I don't want any book banned. I've never used the N word in my life. I hope you've read my first post here. I am not trying to force anything down any children's throat. I respect literature too much ti see it mangled. I agree with RooRshack's last two posts.

 

Words that offend people are fun though.

 

I believe that my fun-making misconstrued my post as sarcastic.

I was agreeing and trying to emphasize the danger of such censorship
I might've failed =P

 

you've got to be kidding me. This book does not teach anyone that it is okay to say "******." You obviously missed the entire point of the book if you think this way.

Mark Twain meant Huck Finn to be a social commentary, as I think RooR pointed out. The word ****** is representative of the social climate when this book was written. This book was not written as a little kids book. Young kids should not read Huck Finn. Thematically, it is much too mature for anyone younger than the high school level to fully understand. High school kids are completely capable of understanding the purpose of Twain's word choice.

If I were a high school english teacher, I would be pissed off that I had to teach the edited version to high schoolers.

 

Definitely. Once you take the word ****** out, a huge part of the moral content/point of the story is stripped from the novel.

We didn't have to read this in school, I read it on my own last year. What we did read in english class was 'Of Mice and Men' by Steinbeck.

If that story was edited to remove any content that led to the realisation that Lenny was borderline retarded, the whole moral point of the story would be missing.

You can't just dissect an author's work, especially when it's a part of it that has such a strong message.

The fact is that ****** Jim was a literary representation of thousands of human beings that were owned by whites during that time. Calling him "Slave Jim" just seems like a really poor attempt to sweep under the rug a small part of the reality of our past, just so that children can read a story they shouldn't be reading in the first place.

 

Having read this entire thread (as incredible as it may seem), I must reintrerate what others have already pointed out: Twain did not intend the writing as a kid's book. In fact, he once lamented that he was "most distressed" to find that "young boys and girls" had access to the book.

It should also be known, though not easily documented, that inclusion of the word "******" was not the sole reason so many critics of the day found the work "rough, coarse, and inelegant" or otherwise lacking literary worth: it was due to the inclusion (in the first printings) of the likeness of a penis in one of the illustrations AND a rather liberal sprinkling of profanity in the characters' everyday language.

As others have stated, Twain never intended the book to be only a story of kids behaving badly, but as a social commentary using the story of kids behaving badly. Huck does make the right decision, contrary to almost everything he "knows".

To change or delete one word so that it is appropriate for grade school readers is really not the point. The true, if underlying, theme of the book is (sadly) too deep even for most high school students.

To change or delete one word of such a great work is ludicrous. Our youngsters are exposed to more vile and offensive language on most any bus (school or public) ride. In our "politically correct" world, we can accept or ignore multiple 'muthafuckas' while even one '******' turns the universe inside out.

There. I've had my say. Bash away.

 

When I read your post it made me laugh but reading stonks' response with all the exclamation points and capitals made me think that perhaps I wasn't clear enough...so yeah...the additional explanation wasn't for you - you don't need it

 

I liked of mice and men.

I never read it in school, but my english teacher had a shelf of them in her room and lent one to me to read during my last few days of high school. I still have it, and only read it about a year after graduation.

Her house just burnt down.... I should probly give that back to her at some point

To whoever I forgot to quote in this post that said that huck finn was originally disliked for it's coarse language, well yes, that's what they said, and may have been a charge against it, but in my assessment, the south would have always resented the harsh truths it told, and the innocent, accepting manner it told them in, which was, of course, the whole point of the book.

This edition (and other censored ones) are designed to alter the realities the book was written to talk about, and so remove the contrasts that make the book valuable and worth reading. If you remove the things that betray an innocent picture as painful, you alter the painful reality to match the innocent, ignorant filter that the main characters see them through. The fact that the reader can see past that filter and see it's problems is why the book was written how it was.

 

why? How many times have you read a book that hasnt been edited to accord with social tastes and political ideas after the author had died? I can tell you now the practice has been going on a lot longer than you think and more widely than you think and often even living authors have no say in whether a publisher changed a word or two here or there. The fact of the matter is that if the book is not being taught in schools because it has one word that offends people in it then according to you its best the book remains banned from the curriculum, however thankfully there are people making decisions about education that have far more respect for culture and education and political entente that agreed the book is best read with the word removed than unread with the word remaining. If you disagre with that I suggest you petition them to ban half the books that are worth being taught in schools and form the basis of great literature that currently reside in school libraries because most of them have had some form of editing to fit in with political and social taste at some point or another.
Go read the bible as it was written in Greece a 1000 years ago and compare it to the bible you read now. Go compare shakespeare as he wrote his plays compared to how they are written now, and you will find that even the works of poets have been changed. Even charles dickens was changed several times I expect that you dont want charles dickens read either because at some point he had ideas that attacked jewish culture changed by publishers.
I dont believe for one moment that taking a word from the book in question and replacing it with another is an argument sustained for any other reason than political value. Racist political values. doyou also believe that shakespere should be banned because he had the word "bastard" changed to "illegitimate son"? LMFAO

 

Well, I think as long as the books are marked "abridged" (I'm not really sure how to spell that) its ok. I think if they remove it from all copies from now on its not a good idea because they are adjusting the original work. that type of censorship is not ok, in my opinion. However, for schools i think its a good idea. Especially if you consider that kids who read it in school are usually anywhere from 9-14. I can just see them somehow getting the idea that using the word is ok because it is in a book. Also, the teachers can have a discussion about how the word was removed and why.


In junior high school we read abridged versions of Great Expectations and some other books. I dont know if they were abridged because of language but we didnt care or notice the difference and we still got the gist of the story.

 

in regards to stonk's ....posts....

The problem with your stance (besides the fact that you use words that you claim have no meaning, which renders your whole argument pointless), is that supporting the editing of books in order to get around them being banned, ignores the issue that books shouldn't be banned.

To claim that supporting the banning of books, is somehow respectful to culture or literature has as much intelligence as the rest of your drivel...

Your claims that it is no different then translating books from one language to another is assinine. Translating, when done properly does not change the meaning of the book.

He used the word ****** specifically because that was the culture that he was talking about, that was the point of it. To change it to a non-offensive word, is to negate the whole point of it being a social commentary of the time.

You don't get past things like racism by hiding from it and pretending it didn't happen. You learn from it and use the lessons to move on.

The things in the past, shouldn't be changed to suit your (or someone elses) idea of what is right or wrong and you shouldn't have a say over what others can read.

 

Oh sorry you are still smarting from that argument, however believe me, its time to move on from it. get over it.

At least ccording to people with a vested interest in promoting a book which reinforces certain political unrest that is the case.

The book caused offence to many people. Are you proposing that schools should allow the sayings and phrases of martin boorman, and adolph hess to be considered as literature, and applied to the curriculum? Are you saying that all books are fit for the national curriculum to be read in schools and enforced on the minds of people too young to decide the value of literature and the messages it enforces? We are talking here about what books are worthy of a school curriculum. The book never was banned, never was burnt, never was taken off the shelves, except in schools which are charged with the task of deciding what is worthy of being taught to children of school age.

The book was never banned!!!!! I will spell it out for you in letters 90 foot high if you like.
the book never was, never has been and never will be banned. It was removed from the school curriculum - ah curriculum lets see what that means shall we

so you see thankfully there are people who give a great deal of thought to that, enough thought so that the future of the children is considered and discussed and from that they work out what values they want children to learn. If you disagree, why dont you study the issues and join the board that makes the decisions that way you get a vote, or just vote at the next elections for education changes. petition politicians

Ah then the monks of old were so so wrong when they set up panels and a whole infrastructure around translation. I expect you believe the whole infrastructure of how translations of a book from one language to another are handled is a waste of time? It may surprise you to know that some companies that are in the business of translating works set up committees and forums and work at getting exact translations because sometimes an idea from one language cannot be translated to another, for example, of all the words in the english language, some languages have far far fewer and therefore some ideas ar not directly transposable so ingenuity and hard work often takes place, some people debate translation of a single word for years before applying it.

Oh I see and that's what youre interested in is it. Well I am sure there are better ways to illustrate that, which dont devolve into a parody

And exactly what lesson is to be learnt from this book that you cant get from another?

Oh really, well I will bear that in mind when I am reading shakespeare, unfortunately I cant afford the original manuscripts and the museum wont let me borrow them, meantime i will just go and burn all my shakespeare books so i cant read them incase there is a word in them shakespeare himself didnt put there. BRB....

 

I have no clue what any of that meant as we do not agree on the meaning of common words.

Could you please stop talking such gibberish?

 

Ridicilous of course, for obvious reasons that are already stated in this thread. By the way, the word slave comes from slavic people and could be considered really offensive as well
I'm sorry, it's a history lesson and it is evident to me it should not be changed.

 

Yes Of course if you like, if it is gibberish to you. I cannot account for your IQ and certainly will leave you to the sound of your own voice which apparently you are so fond of hearing

 

Better change it to just "Jim" then. They should also make his character white and instead of escaping to freedom, he's running north to join the goldrush...