Download or read book Was Huck Black written by Shelley Fisher Fishkin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1994-05-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in 1884, Huck Finn has become one of the most widely taught novels in American curricula. But where did Huckleberry Finn come from, and what made it so distinctive? Shelley Fisher Fishkin suggests that in Huckleberry Finn, more than in any other work, Mark Twain let African-American voices, language, and rhetorical traditions play a major role in the creation of his art. In Was Huck Black?, Fishkin combines close readings of published and unpublished writing by Twain with intensive biographical and historical research and insights gleaned from linguistics, literary theory, and folklore to shed new light on the role African-American speech played in the genesis of Huckleberry Finn. Given that book's importance in American culture, her analysis illuminates, as well, how the voices of African-Americans have shaped our sense of what is distinctively "American" about American literature. Fishkin shows that Mark Twain was surrounded, throughout his life, by richly talented African-American speakers whose rhetorical gifts Twain admired candidly and profusely. A black child named Jimmy whom Twain called "the most artless, sociable and exhaustless talker I ever came across" helped Twain understand the potential of a vernacular narrator in the years before he began writing Huckleberry Finn, and served as a model for the voice with which Twain would transform American literature. A slave named Jerry whom Twain referred to as an "impudent and satirical and delightful young black man" taught Twain about "signifying"--satire in an African-American vein--when Twain was a teenager (later Twain would recall that he thought him "the greatest man in the United States" at the time). Other African-American voices left their mark on Twain's imagination as well--but their role in the creation of his art has never been recognized. Was Huck Black? adds a new dimension to current debates over multiculturalism and the canon. American literary historians have told a largely segregated story: white writers come from white literary ancestors, black writers from black ones. The truth is more complicated and more interesting. While African-American culture shaped Huckleberry Finn, that novel, in turn, helped shape African-American writing in the twentieth century. As Ralph Ellison commented in an interview with Fishkin, Twain "made it possible for many of us to find our own voices." Was Huck Black? dramatizes the crucial role of black voices in Twain's art, and takes the first steps beyond traditional cultural boundaries to unveil an American literary heritage that is infinitely richer and more complex than we had thought.
Download or read book Satire Or Evasion written by James S. Leonard and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging from the laudatory to the openly hostile, 15 essays by prominent African American scholars and critics examine the novel's racist elements and assess the degree to which Twain's ironies succeed or fail to turn those elements into a satirical attack on racism. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Black White and Huckleberry Finn written by Elaine Mensh and published by University Alabama Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Black, White, and "Huckleberry Finn" shows that the argument over black-white relations in the novel is also an argument over nonfictional ones - over black images in white minds, conflicting perceptions of racial harmony, and differing interpretations of the American dream."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Mission High written by Kristina Rizga and published by Bold Type Books. This book was released on 2015-08-04 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is a godsend a moving portrait for anyone wanting to go beyond the simplified labels and metrics and really understand an urban high school, and its highly individual, resilient, eager and brilliant students and educators." -- Dave Eggers, co-founder, 826 National and ScholarMatch Darrell is a reflective, brilliant young man, who never thought of himself as a good student. He always struggled with his reading and writing skills. Darrell's father, a single parent, couldn't afford private tutors. By the end of middle school, Darrell's grades and his confidence were at an all time low. Then everything changed. When education journalist Kristina Rizga first met Darrell at Mission High School, he was taking AP calculus class, writing a ten-page research paper, and had received several college acceptance letters. And Darrell was not an exception. More than 80 percent of Mission High seniors go to college every year, even though the school teaches large numbers of English learners and students from poor families. So, why has the federal government been threatening to close Mission High -- and schools like it across the country? The United States has been on a century long road toward increased standardization in our public schools, which resulted in a system that reduces the quality of education to primarily one metric: standardized test scores. According to this number, Mission High is a "low-performing" school even though its college enrollment, graduation, attendance rates and student surveys are some of the best in the country. The qualities that matter the most in learning -- skills like critical thinking, intellectual engagement, resilience, empathy, self-management, and cultural flexibility -- can't be measured by multiple-choice questions designed by distant testing companies, Rizga argues, but they can be detected by skilled teachers in effective, personalized and humane classrooms that work for all students, not just the most motivated ones. Based on four years of reporting with unprecedented access, the unforgettable, intimate stories in these pages throw open the doors to America's most talked about -- and arguably least understood -- public school classrooms where the largely invisible voices of our smart, resilient students and their committed educators can offer a clear and hopeful blueprint for what it takes to help all students succeed.
Download or read book Huck Finn s America written by Andrew Levy and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines Mark Twain's writing of Huckleberry Finn, calling into question commonly held interpretations of the work on the subjects of youth, youth culture, and race relations, based on research into the social preoccupations of the era in which it was written.
Download or read book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn written by Mark Twain and published by . This book was released on 2021-02-07 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (often shortened to Huck Finn) is a novel written by American humorist Mark Twain. It is commonly used and accounted as one of the first Great American Novels. It is also one of the first major American novels written using Local Color Regionalism, or vernacular, told in the first person by the eponymous Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, best friend of Tom Sawyer and hero of three other Mark Twain books.The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. By satirizing Southern antebellum society that was already a quarter-century in the past by the time of publication, the book is an often scathing look at entrenched attitudes, particularly racism. The drifting journey of Huck and his friend Jim, a runaway slave, down the Mississippi River on their raft may be one of the most enduring images of escape and freedom in all of American literature.
Download or read book Was the Cat in the Hat Black written by Philip Nel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-06 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Racism is resilient, duplicitous, and endlessly adaptable, so it is no surprise that America is again in a period of civil rights activism. A significant reason racism endures is because it is structural: it's embedded in culture and in institutions. One of the places that racism hides-and thus perhaps the best place to oppose it-is books for young people. Was the Cat in the Hat Black? presents five serious critiques of the history and current state of children's literature tempestuous relationship with both implicit and explicit forms of racism. The book fearlessly examines topics both vivid-such as The Cat in the Hat's roots in blackface minstrelsy-and more opaque, like how the children's book industry can perpetuate structural racism via whitewashed covers even while making efforts to increase diversity. Rooted in research yet written with a lively, crackling touch, Nel delves into years of literary criticism and recent sociological data in order to show a better way forward. Though much of what is proposed here could be endlessly argued, the knowledge that what we learn in childhood imparts both subtle and explicit lessons about whose lives matter is not debatable. The text concludes with a short and stark proposal of actions everyone-reader, author, publisher, scholar, citizen- can take to fight the biases and prejudices that infect children's literature. While Was the Cat in the Hat Black? does not assume it has all the answers to such a deeply systemic problem, its audacity should stimulate discussion and activism.
Download or read book The Adventures of Huckeberry Finn written by Mark Twain and published by Jensen. This book was released on 1999-03-22 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recounts the adventures of a young boy and an escaped slave as they travel down the Mississippi River on a raft.
Download or read book The Jim Dilemma written by Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1998 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eloquent defense of Jim, Twain, and the use of Huckleberry Finn in the classroom
Download or read book The Sellout written by Paul Beatty and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2015-03-03 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Man Booker Prize Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction Winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature New York Times Bestseller Los Angeles Times Bestseller Named One of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review Named a Best Book of the Year by Newsweek, The Denver Post, BuzzFeed, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly Named a "Must-Read" by Flavorwire and New York Magazine's "Vulture" Blog A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality—the black Chinese restaurant. Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens—on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles—the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral. Fueled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident—the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins—he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.
Download or read book Is He Dead written by Mark Twain and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-10-17 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A group of impoverished artists living in France stage the death of a friend to increase the value of his paintings and then must engage in cross-dressing, deception, and romantic intrigue in order to make their plot succeed.
Download or read book People of the Book written by Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors are highly productive and respected Jewish-American scholars, critics, and teachers from departments of English, history, American studies, Romance literature, Slavic studies, art, women's studies, comparative literature, anthropology, Judaic studies, and philosophy.
Download or read book Lighting Out for the Territory written by Shelley Fisher Fishkin and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1998-07-09 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fishkin "offers an intriguing look at how Mark Twain's life and work have been cherished, memorialized, exploited, and misunderstood."
Download or read book Mark Twain And The South written by Arthur G. Pettit and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The South was many things to Mark Twain: boyhood home, testing ground for manhood, and the principal source of creative inspiration. Although he left the South while a young man, seldom to return, it remained for him always a haunting presence, alternately loved and loathed. Mark Twain and the South was the first book on this major yet largely ignored aspect of the private life of Samuel Clemens and one of the major themes in his writing from 1863 until his death. Arthur G. Pettit clearly demonstrates that Mark Twain's feelings on race and region moved in an intelligible direction from the white Southern point of view he was exposed to in his youth to self-censorship, disillusionment, and, ultimately, a deeply pessimistic and sardonic outlook in which the dream of racial brotherhood was forever dead. Approaching his subject as a historian with a deep appreciation for literature, he bases his study on a wide variety of Mark Twain's published and unpublished works, including his notebooks, scrapbooks, and letters. An interesting feature of this illuminating work is an examination of Clemens's relations with the only two black men he knew well in his adult years.
Download or read book Inheriting the Trade written by Thomas Norman DeWolf and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2008-01-15 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A trailblazing memoir about one family’s quest to face its slave-trading past, and an urgent call for reconciliation In 2001, Thomas DeWolf discovered that he was related to the most successful slave-trading family in U.S. history, responsible for transporting at least ten thousand Africans. This is his memoir of the journey in which ten family members retraced their ancestors' steps through the notorious triangle trade route—from New England to West Africa to Cuba—and uncovered the hidden history of New England and the other northern states. A difficult but necessary examination of the slave trade, racism, and privilege in the United States, Inheriting the Trade is a powerful call for white America to reassess what they have been taught about their own ancestors, about slavery and wealth, and about America both past and present.
Download or read book Why We Took the Car written by Wolfgang Herrndorf and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully written, darkly funny coming-of-age story from an award-winning, bestselling German author making his American debut. Mike Klingenberg doesn't get why people think he's boring. Sure, he doesn't have many friends. (Okay, zero friends.) And everyone laughs at him when he reads his essays out loud in class. And he's never invited to parties - including the gorgeous Tatiana's party of the year.Andre Tschichatschow, aka Tschick (not even the teachers can pronounce his name), is new in school, and a whole different kind of unpopular. He always looks like he's just been in a fight, his clothes are tragic, and he never talks to anyone.But one day Tschick shows up at Mike's house out of the blue. Turns out he wasn't invited to Tatiana's party either, and he's ready to do something about it. Forget the popular kids: Together, Mike and Tschick are heading out on a road trip. No parents, no map, no destination. Will they get hopelessly lost in the middle of nowhere? Probably. Will meet some crazy people and get into serious trouble? Definitely. But will they ever be called boring again? Not a chance.
Download or read book The Tragedy of Pudd nhead Wilson written by Mark Twain and published by . This book was released on 1894 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a mulatto slave woman switches her own infant with the look-alike son of a wealthy merchant, it takes Pudd'nhead Wilson, the town eccentric, to put things right again.
