One of my fondest childhood memory is reading sawyer and huck. The rural setting was similar to the ones we had in Kerala, India growing up.
It was an old copy and was not censored and included all the racial slurs. It took me years before knowing that the words used were racial slurs as those words were not in common usage in India.
The racial slurs are critical as Twain used them to indict the culture of the antebellum American South, and not to endorse its prejudices. When Huck Finn chooses "All right then, I'll go to Hell" by helping Jim, he goes against his ingrained social training as a white Southerner.
People who want to censor Twain misunderstand his message, either out of ignorance, or purposefully so as to take the sting out of Twain's social commentary and rewrite history.
Perhaps you can think of some works of literature set in India where characters utter analogous slurs, and the purpose of the author is to criticize the caste system?
To the article's point, I grew up in the 80s. Even though I lived a different life from Tom and Huck it wasn't so different that I couldn't relate to it. I wonder how many more generations we can go before that's all gone, or if it already has. There's still a lot of value in it as a work of literature, but I don't know if it has the same intuitive understanding it had in the 20th century.
I don't think that's a bad thing. We shouldn't put the past on a pedestal, but it makes me wonder who the Tom Sawyer of the 21st century is. I just hope it isn't Katniss Everdeen or Edward Cullen.
I doubt a few decades of time is going to make much literature so much harder to understand. Just a little bit of historical context and background on currency values is enough to read and comprehend stuff back to Shakespeare where viewers and readers can instantly recognize the human foibles in fictional characters from centuries ago. Translations are a different beast where it’s a collaboration between translators and original author but there are many subplots in say Don Quixote that would not be out of place in media as different as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia to many romcom movies(I picked the oldest novel I could think of, The Iliad and Odyssey can work though translation does a lot of heavy lifting in those cases for majority of readers).
" I just hope it isn't Katniss Everdeen or Edward Cullen."
How about Harry Potter?
Well, all of those have in common that they are fantasy and not really connected to this reality, while Tom Sawyer was a fictional adventure in reality.
The way people interact has definitely changed with the times. Whole plots of twentieth-century fiction and cinema would now be unlikely or impossible in the smartphone era, for instance.
I'm not sure about that, either. It's common to see Gen Z made uncomfortable by the intense flirtation and amorous pursuit shown in so much classic cinema, because that kind of sexual behavior is declining in developed countries (plausibly due to, among other factors, the ready availability of porn as a way to blow off steam, and the greater risk in the social-media age of getting one's reputation tarred if an advance proves unwelcome).
Cultural ages of relative sexual liberation and suppression is normal too. It's a material world so yeah there are material causes, but the way people are and respond to those pressures never change because we're still the same creatures as we were hundreds of thousands of years ago.
I loved Mark Twain when I was a kid. Read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn multiple times. I didn't even consider reading it to my kid when she was younger. Wasn't a good way to handle all the N words.
I'm going out on a limb perhaps, but I think what makes people be able to relate or not is more up to the person reading the book and story, than what the book and story actually is. Sometimes me and others read the same book, both feel like we can relate to it, even if it's very old and in reality far from our reality, and we both relate to it in different ways. I'd be willing to bet that 100 years from now, people will read contemporary stories set in today and some will see nothing, others will recognize themselves somehow.
First book I've ever read start to finish when I was in school. I remember that we've read a chapter a day in class, each one couple lines until the chapter was done.
I remember those reading circles in first grade. I got bored waiting for kids to stammer out the sentences, and read the rest of the book. The teacher at one point asked what might happen next? I blurted out the rest of the plot. The teacher angrily told me I wasn't allowed to read ahead.
I used to get in trouble doing that because I'd never look at the book.
I'd have finished it, some of them before we'd even be assigned them, and I'd read up the bit we were going to do that day, have my delivery and timing, have my voices all lined up.
Our teacher I think wanted everyone - reading - each - word - at - a - time - like - this, but I couldn't be bothered with that crap. Make the words live! Make the people real!
And now some forty-some years later, I hear my six-year-old reading his books in his bedroom out loud, trying different voices for different characters until he's got one he likes. I'm going to get so many emails from his teacher, aren't I? But I'm not ever going to tell him to stop.
Sometimes when I'm helping with homework, and looking for an example to practice, I find something in the workbook pages which they haven't reached yet. I find it cute when kids are nervous they'll get into trouble for having done the work before the teacher reaches that section. Of all the things to get in trouble for...!
I really, really hope they're worrying unnecessarily! I think it's better to find out early if a teacher is going to have an issue with things like that.
People who are exposed to Mark Twain only through Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn/A Connecticut Yankee/etc. works usually think of him as a "fun" author.
But he had one of the most incisive and intellectual minds of his times, which was biting in its criticisms/satire of American and the larger Human civilization. Everybody (but Americans especially) should read his set of essays titled; On The Damned Human Race for edification.
I often wonder what he would think of current-day American society and so-called democracy. He actually coined the term "Gilded Age" to highlight the covering of everything rotten/corrupt with a superficial sheen so as to sell it to the masses. If that doesn't describe today's society i don't know what does.
And so I find that we have descended and degenerated, from some far ancestor (some microscopic atom wandering at its pleasure between the mighty horizons of a drop of water perchance) insect by insect, animal by animal, reptile by reptile, down the long highway of smirchless innocence, till we have reached the bottom stage of development – nameable as the Human Being. Below us – nothing.
Highly recommend Mark Twain biography by Ron Chernow. I just finished it last week. Samuel Clemens' evolution from where he started to where he finished is something to be admired (just ignore his thoughts on Native Americans, how he treated his children, and his angelfish obsession).
Ah, brings back memories. We did a New Year's school theater presentation in the third grade, playing out the "painting the fence" scene from the book.
In English, which is NOT my native language. I had to memorize my lines without understanding half of them :)
Who is today's Tom Sawyer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gztabfs5ngA
One of my fondest childhood memory is reading sawyer and huck. The rural setting was similar to the ones we had in Kerala, India growing up.
It was an old copy and was not censored and included all the racial slurs. It took me years before knowing that the words used were racial slurs as those words were not in common usage in India.
The racial slurs are critical as Twain used them to indict the culture of the antebellum American South, and not to endorse its prejudices. When Huck Finn chooses "All right then, I'll go to Hell" by helping Jim, he goes against his ingrained social training as a white Southerner.
People who want to censor Twain misunderstand his message, either out of ignorance, or purposefully so as to take the sting out of Twain's social commentary and rewrite history.
Perhaps you can think of some works of literature set in India where characters utter analogous slurs, and the purpose of the author is to criticize the caste system?
The passage where Tom goes to whitewash the fence is brilliant.
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/mark-twain/tom-sawyer#:~:text=T...
Relatable to any kids forced to do chores.
I have always felt that that passage more than any other story sums up the spirit of the USA.
Ha, Ha!
You will love then Poe's essay on the "theory and practice of scams" titled; Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences - https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/diddlnga.htm
To the article's point, I grew up in the 80s. Even though I lived a different life from Tom and Huck it wasn't so different that I couldn't relate to it. I wonder how many more generations we can go before that's all gone, or if it already has. There's still a lot of value in it as a work of literature, but I don't know if it has the same intuitive understanding it had in the 20th century.
I don't think that's a bad thing. We shouldn't put the past on a pedestal, but it makes me wonder who the Tom Sawyer of the 21st century is. I just hope it isn't Katniss Everdeen or Edward Cullen.
I doubt a few decades of time is going to make much literature so much harder to understand. Just a little bit of historical context and background on currency values is enough to read and comprehend stuff back to Shakespeare where viewers and readers can instantly recognize the human foibles in fictional characters from centuries ago. Translations are a different beast where it’s a collaboration between translators and original author but there are many subplots in say Don Quixote that would not be out of place in media as different as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia to many romcom movies(I picked the oldest novel I could think of, The Iliad and Odyssey can work though translation does a lot of heavy lifting in those cases for majority of readers).
" I just hope it isn't Katniss Everdeen or Edward Cullen."
How about Harry Potter?
Well, all of those have in common that they are fantasy and not really connected to this reality, while Tom Sawyer was a fictional adventure in reality.
Harry Potter was published before 2000, and is upped by Diana Wynne Jones' Chrestomanci in every way.
I'd rather have one of the Baginses (not the Sackville mind you)
Times change but people don't.
The way people interact has definitely changed with the times. Whole plots of twentieth-century fiction and cinema would now be unlikely or impossible in the smartphone era, for instance.
Sure, the plot devices might be rendered moot by technological change but the underlying motivations remain the same.
Technology has changed, but humans haven’t.
I'm not sure about that, either. It's common to see Gen Z made uncomfortable by the intense flirtation and amorous pursuit shown in so much classic cinema, because that kind of sexual behavior is declining in developed countries (plausibly due to, among other factors, the ready availability of porn as a way to blow off steam, and the greater risk in the social-media age of getting one's reputation tarred if an advance proves unwelcome).
Cultural ages of relative sexual liberation and suppression is normal too. It's a material world so yeah there are material causes, but the way people are and respond to those pressures never change because we're still the same creatures as we were hundreds of thousands of years ago.
I'm struggling to imagine how that's common to see
True. Just look at the graffiti in Pompeii and by Romans on the pyramids etc.
I loved Mark Twain when I was a kid. Read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn multiple times. I didn't even consider reading it to my kid when she was younger. Wasn't a good way to handle all the N words.
I'm going out on a limb perhaps, but I think what makes people be able to relate or not is more up to the person reading the book and story, than what the book and story actually is. Sometimes me and others read the same book, both feel like we can relate to it, even if it's very old and in reality far from our reality, and we both relate to it in different ways. I'd be willing to bet that 100 years from now, people will read contemporary stories set in today and some will see nothing, others will recognize themselves somehow.
First book I've ever read start to finish when I was in school. I remember that we've read a chapter a day in class, each one couple lines until the chapter was done.
I remember those reading circles in first grade. I got bored waiting for kids to stammer out the sentences, and read the rest of the book. The teacher at one point asked what might happen next? I blurted out the rest of the plot. The teacher angrily told me I wasn't allowed to read ahead.
I used to get in trouble doing that because I'd never look at the book.
I'd have finished it, some of them before we'd even be assigned them, and I'd read up the bit we were going to do that day, have my delivery and timing, have my voices all lined up.
Our teacher I think wanted everyone - reading - each - word - at - a - time - like - this, but I couldn't be bothered with that crap. Make the words live! Make the people real!
And now some forty-some years later, I hear my six-year-old reading his books in his bedroom out loud, trying different voices for different characters until he's got one he likes. I'm going to get so many emails from his teacher, aren't I? But I'm not ever going to tell him to stop.
Sometimes when I'm helping with homework, and looking for an example to practice, I find something in the workbook pages which they haven't reached yet. I find it cute when kids are nervous they'll get into trouble for having done the work before the teacher reaches that section. Of all the things to get in trouble for...!
I really, really hope they're worrying unnecessarily! I think it's better to find out early if a teacher is going to have an issue with things like that.
Hopefully his teacher is better
People who are exposed to Mark Twain only through Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn/A Connecticut Yankee/etc. works usually think of him as a "fun" author.
But he had one of the most incisive and intellectual minds of his times, which was biting in its criticisms/satire of American and the larger Human civilization. Everybody (but Americans especially) should read his set of essays titled; On The Damned Human Race for edification.
I often wonder what he would think of current-day American society and so-called democracy. He actually coined the term "Gilded Age" to highlight the covering of everything rotten/corrupt with a superficial sheen so as to sell it to the masses. If that doesn't describe today's society i don't know what does.
Read also; The Lowest Animal by Mark Twain - https://www.thoughtco.com/the-lowest-animal-by-mark-twain-16...
And so I find that we have descended and degenerated, from some far ancestor (some microscopic atom wandering at its pleasure between the mighty horizons of a drop of water perchance) insect by insect, animal by animal, reptile by reptile, down the long highway of smirchless innocence, till we have reached the bottom stage of development – nameable as the Human Being. Below us – nothing.
Highly recommend Mark Twain biography by Ron Chernow. I just finished it last week. Samuel Clemens' evolution from where he started to where he finished is something to be admired (just ignore his thoughts on Native Americans, how he treated his children, and his angelfish obsession).
Ah, brings back memories. We did a New Year's school theater presentation in the third grade, playing out the "painting the fence" scene from the book.
In English, which is NOT my native language. I had to memorize my lines without understanding half of them :)