Cancel Culture

[Keith&Co.]

For the life of me, I'm uncertain why Huck Finn is taught in High School

Frankly, i feel that the curricula coordinator in our district hasn't read a book on her list. She knows Twain is 'a classic.' I think she throws darts.

A Melville scholar wants to have all Berkshire schoolchildren read Moby Dick because part of it was written here.
I can't read Moby Dick. I tried in high school. I gave up and retreated to something easier, Gulliver's Travels.
But the coordinator thinks he has a point and keeps asking if this should be part of middle school or high school curricula.
I keep wanting someone to ask her what's her favorite part of the book. Which i think was ritten on a pay-by-the-word contract.

 

[Politesse]

I love Moby Dick, but I suspect its sardonic humor and trenchant social commentary is not as obvious to straight folk, being as heavily coded it is in the "polite language" of the time. No one tell the conservatives about the subtext, they'd ban it on principle. Perhaps we should stick to a narrative of "it's a book about the once thriving whaling industry, unfairly canceled by woke environmentalists in 1971...."

Also, holy crap, if Huck Finn has too many race issues, Moby Dick is a positive dumpster fire of racist and bigoted language; sympathetic though Melville is to his fellow persecuted citizens, it is a work of satire and freely employs the racist language of the time to make its point. I think the secondary main character, the South Pacfic Islander Queequeeg, is called a heathen more often than he is called by his rightful name.

Interesting fact: it actually wasn't a pay-by-the-word serial, though that was a pretty common phenomenon at the time. The book was more like a personal obsession of Herman Melville's, a semi-autobiographical work that he banged out in less than two years and published as a three-volume set. It was an utter failure commercially, and was only revived after the hubbub surrounding the centennial of Melville's death brought it to scholarly attention. It had been quietly passed down as a "cult classic" within the equivalent of the queer community up to that point, and when William Faulkner, himself a celebrity author by that point and "well acquainted" with the gay community, remarked that it was his favorite novel, quite a buzz grew around it well after its initial publication.

Melville's main claim to fame during his lifetime was the book Omoo, which today is obscure as all hell. Funny how things go.

 

[laughing dog]

I read Moby Dick. For me, the book would have been more enjoyable if the detailed and long descriptions of how whales were carved up etc... were not included.

In my opinion, for any K12 curriculum there are plenty of excellent source materials - fiction and non-fiction - available are educational and enjoyable. While I appreciate the concern educators and some parents have about exposing their children to traumatic literature, I think it is better if they talk with their children than to ban books.

 

[jab]

Yes, I understand Politesse. It was my own over-indulgence in nostalgia that led me to a too-simplistic one-sided view. This same "nostalgia" (if that's how to describe it) makes me resent the denigration of the great Thomas Jefferson.

At first I was disgusted to read that an addition of Huck Finn replaces each 'nigger' with 'slave,' but perhaps that's a good compromise.

I t has been a while since I taught Huckleberry Finn, an overrated book because of its horribly fumbled resolution. Huck struggles with his racism, and uses racist epithets when he is losing the struggle--racist epithets which are a legacy of his white, rejecting society, and of his vicious white father. I am teaching Langston Hughes' Not Without Laughter to a group of undergrads tonight. When it goes out of copyright, how will politically correct editors handle its language? Then there's the use of the racist epithet in a white character's stream of consciousness in Woolf's "An Unwritten Novel", which I shall be teaching this summer.