Chapter 1: “Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target”

Main Problem: Huckleberry Finn has been “idolized” appearing in countless school
curriculums causing students, parents and faculty to complain because of its constant use
of the word nigger. Is this novel an excuse for white people to excessively use the term or
is it not?
 The Idol
o “Idolatry means selective memory (17).”
o True American
o Can be debated, but authorities are final say
 The Problem
o 213 uses of “the word”
o Stereotyping in characterization of Jim
o Robert Penn Warren “Who Speaks for the Negro?” (20)
o Twain’s imagined audience was white (Ellison on pg. 21:
“Everybody reads now… Everybody is saying, Damn it, tell it like
I think it is”)
o “HF served a national and global political function as an icon on
integration, and the importance of this cultural work overrode the
offense the book generated among many of its newly authorized,
but also newly obligated, African American readers (21).”
o Critics like Justin Kaplan say that Twain was a white liberal who
supported race relations and any reader (white or black) who fails
to realize that is at their own fault.
 The Word
o Twain is so great that his words should not be changed for political
correctness…
o But… “How great must artists be before we trust them so much
that their words are treated not only as unchangeable but also as
obligatory? (31)”
o Is the fact that the use of the word nigger used so often giving the
idea to scholars, teachers and readers that is right to used??
 The Arguments
o Need to look at the time period of when the literary text’s
“academic canononical discourse” started forming (HF=1950’s)
o “It’s moral stance as an achievement of irony”/good discrimination
vs. bad discrimination (32)
o Can’t legitimatize one way of reading
o Characters or author do not always know what readers of later time
already know (Huck does not know the history of slavery was
doomed, but readers today do)
o A major irony of the book is the exposure of many types of literary
thought and feeling on slavery, but it’s not the only one (35)
o We recognize that Huck’s decision to go to hell was his own in the
story, but it was a widespread belief in the 19th century, with this
 superior knowledge we can also ironize his independence and
morality
o “Here is the motive for idolatry. Because the structure of the
sublime joins reader, character, and author in interlinked
identifications, it may lead to narcissistically fixed mirrorings
rather than ‘ecstatic’ mobility (36).”
o Add America to the identifications and you get character to author
to reader to nation

Chapter 6: Nationalism and Hypercanonization

 Main Question: How did Huckleberry Finn and other great works come to
be considered so “great”?
o “I was struck by what seemed to me a state of hypercanonization…
meaning that very few individual works monopolize curricular and
critical attention (133)”
 Literature comes with value: what is studied, taught and read
 Changing definition of literature and the problem of genre (or different
kinds of writing)
o “national narrative”
o “local” narrative
o “personal narrative”
 Cultural transformations of 19th Century: Emergence of nationality and of
literature
 Hypercanonization (137)
o Step 1: To be understood as literary
o Step 2: Literary value had to be nationalized
 Nationalizing of literary narrative: the text offers an imaginary world of
the ideal and perfect nation
o Arac wants to say Huckleberry Finn’s only value is connected to
it’s “counter”-culture (138)
 Dominance of literary narrative over all other narratives (shown in the
insisted addition to the California Edition of HF) (142)
 Local Humor vs. Literary Subversion
o Read it with race and slavery in mind
o Read it as southwestern humor
o Tradition and innovation (144)
 Tradition: part of American Romance (Chases and Fiedler)
 Innovation: “inaugurating the vernacular in American
prose” (Marx and Smith)
 Literary vs. National Narrative (Twain vs. Cooper) (148)
o National: understanding of American history, responsible for
showing and explaining this understanding
o Literary: Denied and challenged this understanding
(again…“counter” culture)
o Literary is better: “Huck Finn lives so as to feel right with no
sanction beyond his own psyche, the imaginative construction of
autonomous self that is the cultural work of literary narrative…
(153)”