In a 1935 book about a safari he took with his wife, Green Hills of Africa, Ernest Hemingway made one of the most frequently redacted remarks about Mark Twain. Here is the uncensored version:
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.
The part reviewers like to quote leaves out the second, third and fourth sentences, often without indicating the ellipsis. That ellipsis is significant for a number of reasons: (1) The censored version of Hemingway’s statement is used to assert Hemingway considered Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to be the great American novel, but Hemingway is not entirely uncritical. (2) The most censored word in the English language, now routinely alluded to as “the n-word” appears at least 219 times in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and has been grounds for censorship of the novel since at least the 1950s, when the NAACP called for a banning of the novel from schools and libraries. (3) The phrase “Nigger Jim” never occurs in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, although many prominent critics have used it as if it did. (4) Hemingway’s notion that “the real end” is the point when Jim is stolen, that the last part of the novel “is just cheating” is worth interrogating.
This course navigates the ongoing controversies regarding Mark Twain by investigating both his personal attitudes and those of the Missouri in which he was born and raised. Right on the Western frontier of the United States, it had gained statehood only in 1821, a mere fourteen years before Twain’s birth. Slavery was legal, but significant opposition to it, especially in Northern counties, and the state did not secede from the union during the civil war.
We will explore in our readings Mark Twain’s attitudes toward race and racism as well as the role of his signature humor in coping with tragedies of race, class and family. He has been called America’s greatest critical race theorist, while simultaneously being banned—a condition I believe he’d find ludicrous, yet sobering.
Students may find all of Twain’s writing online, so you need not buy books, but I recommend the following editions:
Heinrich Hoffmann, Der Struwwelpeter auf Englisch: Nachdichtung von Mark Twain (Reclam, 2016)
Mark Twain, The Prince and the Pauper, 1881. Oxford World Classics. Ed and Intro. Lucy Rollin.
__________, Tom Sawyer, 1876. Norton Critical Edition, ed. Beverly Lyon Clark.
__________, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884. Norton Critical Edition, ed. Thomas Cooley.
___________, Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins, 1894. Norton Critical Edition, ed. Sidney E. Berger
It would be a good idea to get as much of the reading as possible done before the semester begins.
Here are useful Mark Twain sites, including first editions of his writing and contemporary reviews.
Mark Twain manuscript collection, University of Virginia: https://ead.lib.virginia.edu/vivaxtf/view?docId=uva-sc/viu00005.xml;query=
Puddenhead Wilson page:
https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/wilson/pwhompg.html
https://marktwainstudies.com/about/mark-twain-in-elmira/
Site devoted to Mark Twain’s writing in Elmira, NY—where he wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at Quarry Farm
https://www.marktwainproject.org/
Mark Twain House in Hartford, Ct.: https://marktwainhouse.org/about/mark-twain/major-works/
Virtual tour of the house (you can click your way through): https://www.capturepics.com/3d-model/mark-twain-house-hartford-connecticut/skinned/
Writers whom you might find particularly interesting on Twain (not required—just recommended): Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Jonathan Arac. |
