"Huckleberry Finn" as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time (Wisconsin Project on American Writers) Book

If racially offensive epithets are banned on CNN air time and in the pages of USA Today, Jonathan Arac asks, shouldnt a fair hearing be given to those who protest their use in an eighth-grade classroom? Placing Mark Twains comic masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn, in the context of long-standing American debates about race and culture, Jonathan Arac has written a work of scholarship in the service of citizenship. Huckleberry Finn, Arac points out, is Americas most beloved book, assigned in schools more than any other work because it is considered both the quintessential American novel and an important weapon against racism. But when some parents, students, and teachers have condemned the books repeated use of the word nigger, their protests have been vehemently and often snidely countered by cultural authorities, whether in the universities or in the New York Times and the Washington Post. The paradoxical result, Arac contends, is to reinforce racist structures in our society and to make a sacred text of an important book that deserves thoughtful reading and criticism. Arac does not want to ban Huckleberry Finn, but to provide a context for fairer, fuller, and better-informed debates. Arac shows how, as the Cold War began and the Civil Rights movement took hold, the American critics Lionel Trilling, Henry Nash Smith, and Leo Marx transformed the public image of Twains novel from a popular boys book to a central document of American culture. Hucks feelings of brotherhood with the slave Jim, it was implied, represented all that was right and good in American culture and democracy. Drawing on writings by novelists, literary scholars, journalists, and historians, Arac revisits the era of the novels setting in the 1840s, the period in the 1880s when Twain wrote and published the book, and the postWorld War II era, to refute many deeply entrenched assumptions about Huckleberry Finn and its place in cultural history, both nationally and globally. Encompassing discussion of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Archie Bunker, James Baldwin, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and Mark Fuhrman, Aracs book is trenchant, lucid, and timely.Read More