The Controversy Over Censorship In Huckleberry Finn Essay Example for Free

The Controversy Over Censorship In Huckleberry Finn Essay Throughout the years, conflict with race has set the tone for the flowering and evolution of Americas history. In present day America, racial slurs are uncommon. They are used as a sign of discrimination in a way that is unfamiliar to the ear. Published in 1884, Mark Twain wrote one of the most powerful stories of all time, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which exhibits the intimate dynamic of racism in the time of great agony, injustice, and inequity for African Americans. The word ‘nigger’ appears 219 times throughout the story. (Hudson, 2011) This has provoked a great amount of conflict, and has escalated to the extent in which many schools are forbidding the book; erasing it from grade-school curricula due to the illiberality in context. Years have passed, and racism is now not accepted in many societies, as it was in the 19th century. We forget that Twain used his language to instrument the behavior of society. Language serves as a link to historical culture. Removing the word would remove the significance of why it was ever placed there. (Bouie 2011) For years now, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been ceasing rapidly from school curricula because of the use of the word ‘nigger’. Instead of banning the book, the idea of changing the word from â€Å"nigger† to â€Å"slave† has been issued. Alan Gribben, an english professor at Auburn University, proposed this idea to the publisher in hopes that more schools could persist in using Mark Twain’s writing as an educational source and in trust that this addition would manage the growth of the roots of the book once again. Gribben once wrote, â€Å"even at the level of college and graduate school, students are capable of resenting textual encounters with this racial appellative.† (Gribben, 2011) Substituting the word does nothing essential to the aspect of understanding our failures. Avoiding the fruitless actions of the past does not gain justice, awareness, and will not yield an era in which discrimination occurred. (Chabon, 2011) Although the language in Huckleberry Finn is discriminatory towards African Americans, the actions of banning and substitution should not be made. America was not always the same way it is today, and that is something we, as Americans, have to respect and understand. There is no better way to connect to the story than without the tone and word choice while reading the unrevised edition of Huck Finn. This was a culture that was ugly and cruel. Pretending it never happened, by substituting the word ‘nigger’ for ‘slave’, cannot provide the full amount of wisdom and accurate knowledge of this generation. Earl Ofari Huchinson from The Grio states, â€Å"Critics are calling it censorship, a slap at freedom of speech, and a gross distortion of Twain’s intent Twain’s goal was to show the ugliness an evilness of slavery and to do that he had to use the rawest racist language of his day.† (Huchinson, 2011) Twain was aware of the discerning words a nd selected them finely to portray this era of life. The era of this story was based on a time that racial slurs were more acceptable and habitual. Slavery was a large part of society. Time was different. Language was raw. Twain used his words to show the immortality of society linked to slavery and to do this, he used the most vulgar language of this time. (Huchinson, 2011) He chose words that were essential to the intimacy of the story, and should not have been blamed for such language that was used more than a century ago. Jennifer Crane explains for The Corner Observer, that Huckleberry Finn shows an accurate understanding of how far our society has come since the 1800’s. â€Å"Besides getting a history lesson, Huck teaches us life lessons. It shows how an innocent boy can break free from societys wrongful thinking and finally think for himself. This act of individualism by Huck affects how people viewed race,† (Crane, 2011) she comments. Yet the decision to keep the book from the original is still up in the air. (Crane, 2011) People may argue that the substitution is the best method to keep these books in grade school curriculum. (Kakutani, 2011) Starting on page six, the ‘n’ word begins to escalate and continue to be seen till the last chapter. This word is one that most people do not find comfortable saying, let alone reading. Changing the authors original work, even in the slightest, alters the intentions that were engaged. A new, restored edition of Huckleberry Finn will be released in mid-february by SouthNew books. Words will be eliminated that appear displeasing. Their main task is to develop a new impression of Huckleberry Finn that may gather a new group of individuals. At a disparaging standpoint, altering a book’s motives, by removing or substituting a word, would completely diminish the motif Twain possessed. Alexandra Petri from The Atlantic wrote, â€Å"This is like changing War and Peace to Peace, because war is unpleasant to remember.† (Petri, 2011) Their mission, in my eyes, confuses me, because I do not comprehend the idea and reasoning around altering a story’s cultural presence to gather a larger crowd, when they do not get to experience the absolute, powerful experience that they otherwise would. Exchanging ‘nigger’ for ‘slave’ is unreasonable and holds a weight of culture and historical importance. Removing this curriculum in schools deprives children of famous, classic literature that has such great history and mark on society. (La Rosa, 2011) (restate thesis, intro) References: Bouie, J. (2011). Taking the History out of ‘Huck Finn.’ The Atlantic. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/01/taking-the-history-out-of-huck-finn/68870/ Chabon, M. (2011). The Unspeakable, in Its Jammies. The Atlantic. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/01/the-unspeakable-in-its-jammies/69369/ Crane, J. (2011 February 8). There shouldn’t be a controversy over Huck. The Corning Observer. Retrieved from http://www.corning-observer.com/articles/book-9139-huck-schools.html Huchinson, E. (2011 January 5). Why the N-word should stay in ‘Huck Finn’. The Grio. Retrieved from http://thegrio.com/2011/01/05/why-the-n-word-should-stay-in-huck-finn/ Kakutani, M. (2011, January 6). Light Out, Huck, They Still Want to Sivilize You. The New York Times. Retrieved from

Dracula characters :: Essays Papers

Dracula characters Bram Stoker’s characters  · Dracula - central character of the book: An old vampire who lives in a crumbling castle in Transylvania. As the book begins, he is planning to move to England, where he can feed on fresh blood. When we first meet him, Dracula is described as an old man with a white mustache, and he appears courtly and charming; as the book progresses and feeds upon his victims, he grows younger and becomes more like a beast.  · Van Helsing – A professor, who is described by his former pupil Dr. Seward as "a philosopher and metaphysician, and one of the most advanced scientists of his day." Van Helsing knows a lot about vampires, and when he is called in to help with Lucy Westenra's illness, he realizes that he is dealing with a vampire. Because of his intelligence, he is Dracula's main problem and the leader of the group that attempts to destroy the vampire.  · Jonathan Harker - A young English solicitor, or lawyer, who is sent to Transylvania to finish up a real estate transaction with Dracula. He becomes a prisoner in the castle and barely escapes by running down the castle wall. He is engaged to Mina Murray and marries her during the novel.  · Mina Murray - Jonathan Harker's fiancee and later wife, she is a practical young woman who works as a teacher. She is best friends with Lucy Westenra, the Count's first victim in the book, and also gets sucked by Dracula as well.  · Lucy Westenra - Mina's best friend and an attractive, young woman. She is loved by Arthur, Quincey, and John and becomes engaged to Arthur.

A Critical Analysis of Homi K. Bhabha’s “How Newness Enters The World” Essay

The Indian theorist Homi K. Bhabha shifted the limelight from the binary1 of the colonizer and the colonized to the liminal spaces in-between in the domain of Postcolonial studies. In Difference, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism, he stated, â€Å"There is always, in Said, the suggestion that colonial power is possessed entirely by the colonizer which is a historical and theoretical simplification† (200). He asserted that colonization is not just a conscious body of knowledge (Said’s manifest Orientalism) but also the â€Å"unconscious positivity† of fantasy and desire (Bhabha’s latent Orientalism) (Young, â€Å"White Mythologies† 181). Bhabha used that vantage point — of liminal spaces — to study the phenomenon of cultural translation in his essay â€Å"How Newness Enters the World†¦Ã¢â‚¬  which was published in a collection of essays titled under The Location of Culture (1994). The liminal zone that the postcolonial immigrant occupies is the guiding question of this essay. Bhabha explains: I used architecture literally as a reference, using the attic, the boiler room, and the stairwell to make associations between certain binary divisions such as higher and lower†¦. The stairwell became a liminal space, a pathway between the upper and lower areas†¦. (3-4) In â€Å"How Newness†¦Ã¢â‚¬  Bhabha directs this framework to critique Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. He argues that the category of Postmodern assumes a neat categorization of subject positions, which leaves no room for subjects to exist in the liminal space. He asserts, â€Å"For Jameson, the possibility of becoming historical demands a containment of this disjunctive social time.† (217) Bhabha elaborates upon the concept of liminal space with the help of the idea of blasphemy, as it comes out in Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and  underlines the controversy of the Rushdie Affair2. Bhabha says, â€Å"Blasphemy is not merely a misrepresentation of the sacred by the secular; it is a moment when the subject-matter or the content of cultural tradition is being overwhelmed, or alienated, in the act of translation.† (225) In essence, Bhabha is arguing that the very act of inhabiting the liminal space — whether by Rushdie or his characters — is blasphemy. However, it is necessary to consider that critics like Timothy Brennan claim that Rushdie â€Å"†¦ is not abroad at all. Politically and professionally he is at home.†(Wars 65) Brennan adds that Rushdie’s knowledge of Islam is limited to some childhood experiences and a course that he did at Cambridge University. If we look at Rushdie from this perspective, then Rushdie would cease to inhabit what Bhabha calls the liminal space between two cultures and instead belong to and speak for the imperial west. Nevertheless, apart from Rushdie’s fiction, Bhabha employs various other kinds of evidence to support his theoretical stand in this essay. The first of which is the epigraph3 from Walter Benjamin’s â€Å"On Language as Such†¦Ã¢â‚¬  in this essay Benjamin suggests that translation is the origin of all knowledge: â€Å"The language of things can pass into language of knowledge and name only through translation† (70-71). It is the gap between the original and the translated text that Bhabha terms as the liminal space. To illustrate this use of translation in cultural terms Bhabha cites Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. He argues that Marlow’s lie to the intended (about her fiance’s last words) is an example of cultural translation where â€Å"Marlow does not merely repress the ‘truth’ †¦ as much as he enacts a poetics of translation†¦.† (212). Marlow inhabits the in-between space of the colony and the western metropolis, where nothing crosses from one to the other in its original form, without a certain degree of cultural translation. This essay is organized in three sections: New World Borders, Foreign Relations and Community Matters. However, it is strung together by the common idea of liminality. The first section draws a parallel between Marlow’s lie and Jameson’s theory of the postmodern, which Bhabha calls his â€Å"theme park†. Both of these, according to Bhabha’s framework, are attempts to keep the â€Å"conversation of humankind going† and â€Å"to preserve the neo-pragmatic universe†. (212) Bhabha elucidates his criticism of Jameson by re-visiting the poem China, which Jameson had earlier commented upon in his book4. He contests Jameson for not appropriating the newness of China but translating it back into certain familiar terms. He destabilizes Jameson’s periodization and claims that communities cannot be explained in pre-modernist terms, the history of communities parallels the history of modernity. In the next section, Bhabha scrutinises Jameson’s postmodern city through the subject position of migrants and minorities. He challenges the importance given to class relations in the Marxist discourse by shifting the focus to minority groups. It is important to note that minority is a not just a matter of quantity, but as Deleuze and Guattari point out in â€Å"Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature†, it is a matter of subject position. The last section poses the last challenge to Jameson, as Bhabha pitches communities directly against class, using Partha Chatterjee’s â€Å"A Response†¦Ã¢â‚¬  as evidence. Bhabha comments, â€Å"Community disturbs the grand globalizing narrative of capital, displaces the emphasis on production in ‘class’ collectivity†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (230). In other words, minority subject position of belonging to a community punctures the larger Marxist narrative of class-consciousness; he calls community the â€Å"antagonist supplement of modernity.† Bhabha concludes the essay by proposing an alternative perspective through Derek Walcott’s poems. Bhabha draws a bridge5 between the central concerns of naming in Walcott’s poem (â€Å"Names†) and the central idea of his essay by asserting that the right to signify, the right to naming, is itself â€Å"an act of cultural translation.† (234). He suggests a breakthrough in the form of the spaces that lie between â€Å"above and below and heaven and hell†. He argues that the only possibility of an agency that enables one to posses something anew lies in the in-between spaces — the liminal spaces. Concepts, such as liminality are indispensible in today’s ever-globalising context but many other theorists have criticized his theoretical model on various grounds. The Indian Marxist critic Aijaz Ahmad says that Bhabha uses a â€Å"†¦ a theoretical melange which randomly invokes Levi-Strauss in one phrase, Foucault in another, Lacan in yet another.† (68), he asserts that in such a framework â€Å"theory itself becomes a marketplace of ideas†¦.† (70). Viewed from a Marxist standpoint, Bhabha’s theories may seem as if they leave no room for resistance and action, Ahmad claims that Bhabha is irrelevant for a majority of the population that has been denied access to such benefits of â€Å"modernity† (69), and that Bhabha cuts access to â€Å"progress† as well as a sense of a â€Å"long past†. Ahmed’s criticism can be taken a step further to conduct a theoretical study of the effectiveness of Bhabha’s arguments. In Nation and Narration Bhabha announced that his intention was to engage â€Å"the insights of poststructuralist theories of narrative knowledge †¦ in order to evoke this ambivalent margin of the nation-space†¦.† (4) Catherine Belsey in Poststructuralism†¦ explains that the simple inference of poststructuralism is that language is â€Å"differential† and not â€Å"referential† in nature. (9) Taking from Saussure’s theory on language, it studies language synchronically where the signifier is not referentially tied to the signified. On the other hand, it is evident from Benjamin’s essays6 that he views language as a diachronic system where it represents the â€Å"†¦medium in which objects meet and enter into relationship with each other, no longer directly, as once in the mind of the augur or prie st, but in their essences† (68). In other words, Benjamin’s theory of language is referential, where the word has or once had a direct connection with the thing it represents. These two models of language seem like blocks from different puzzles, which do not really fit with one another. This poses a serious challenge to the effectiveness of Bhabha’s theoretical groundwork, as he does not address this rift between the two models and employs them simultaneously. However, we cannot discount Bhabha’s breakthrough on this ground, as his  theories are essential to make sense of the postcolonial condition of immigrants and diasporic Literature, especially in the ever-globalizing world that we inhabit. He has given an indispensible insight into the possibilities that lie in these liminal spaces. Works Cited Ahmad, Aijaz. In theory: Classes, nations, literatures. London: Verso, 1994. Belsey, Catherine. Poststructuralism: A very short introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Benjamin, Walter, and Knut Tarnowski. â€Å"Doctrine of the Similar (1933).† New German Critique 17 1979: 65-69 —. â€Å"On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.† Walter Benjamin: selected writings 1 1996: 62-74 Bhabha, Homi K. (1983a), â€Å"Difference, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism† The Politics of Theory. Ed. Francis Barker et al. Colchester: University of Essex. —. â€Å"How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Times and the Trials of Cultural Translation.† The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. 212-235. —. Nation and narration. New York: Routledge, 1990. —. â€Å"The Location of Culture. 1994. â€Å"With a new preface by the author. London: Routledge, 2004. Brennan, Timothy. Wars of position: The cultural politics of left and right. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Chatterjee, Partha. â€Å"A Response to Taylor’s â€Å"Modes of Civil Society†.† Public Culture 3.1 1990: 119-132. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and Other Tales. Oxford: World’s Classics, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Theory and History of Literature. Vol. 30. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. 1988.† London: Vintage, 1998. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage 1979. Walcott, Derek. Collected Poems, 1948-1984. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1992. Young, Robert. White Mythologies: History Writing and the West. London and New York: Routledge (1991).

8 DIY Ideas for Back to School