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.
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About the Author
Jonathan Arac is professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including After Foucault, Postmodernism and Politics, and Critical Genealogies.
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7 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Good idea spoiled by academic snobbery,
By A Customer
This review is from: Huckleberry Finn As Idol and Target : The Functions of Criticism in Our Time (The Wisconsin Project on American Writers) (Paperback)
If this book is supposed to provide "a context for fairer, fuller, and better-informed debates" on Huckelberry Finn, then the only people the author must think are doing the debating are cloistered academics. The issue frequently under debate is whether to "ban" Huck Finn from classrooms because of the infamous "N-word." This issue therefore begins and ends with secondary and high school parents and teachers. Academics with PHd's have little to nothing to do with this debate in the real world other than to provide sound-bites for the media. The people who need this type of book, the non-academic parents and students who will end up having do live with the results of the debate need not look to Arac's text except as a sleeping pill. What could have been a very lively reading on a stimulating subject is submerged by the author with the usual academic psycho-babble. Weigh this book against Shelly Fisher-Fishkin's popular and highly accessible "Was Huck Black?" and "Lighting Out for the Territory" and you can see why the pro-Twain faction always comes out looking better even if they lose the debate. Arac's book is inaccessible to the average parent (black or white) who must continually resort to a reactionary mode when faced with the prospect that their child will have to see and hear the word "nigger" when Huck Finn is assigned in class. As a result this is hardly a work of "scholarship in the service of citizenship." It is a work of scholarship in the service of exclusive academia only. I'm not saying that the book should have been "dumbed down" for use by the average reader, but that the text reeks of stereotypical academic snobbery. As Huck Finn himself might have said, "This book puts on airs." It's a pity becasue Arac raises some good points, which are unfortunately lost in ten dollar words and page length sentences.
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