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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ~ Response-to-Expository-Text EssayHonors English IIIDIRECTIONS:Read the three articles concerning Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.Annotate each article - highlight key facts/information, identify author’s focus/position, indicate where you question or agree with the author’s statements, etc. You will submit your annotated articles as part of the assignment.Write/type a five-paragraph responsive essay in the following format:Paragraph 1/Introductory Paragraph: discuss the primary focus of the articles and include a clear thesis statement that summarizes the main point(s) of each article. (EX: The authors’ positions concerning the new version of Huckleberry Finn include a rationale explaining the censorship, a suggestion that the book is best suited for college students, and a challenge that an artist’s work should never be altered.)Paragraph 2: summarize “Huck Finn’ Navigating Choppy Waters”; include and analyze one piece of textual evidence from the article to support the author’s purpose. *Note: The author DOES take a clear position in this article.Paragraph 3: summarize “Send Huck Finn to College”; include and analyze one piece of textual evidence from the article to support the author’s purpose.Paragraph 4: summarize “Don’t Censor Mark Twain’s N Word”; include and analyze one piece of textual evidence from the article to support the author’s purpose.Paragraph 5/Concluding paragraph: Choose one of the articles and state whether you agree or disagree with the author’s purpose/position. You must support your opinion with two additional pieces of evidence – textual evidence from the article you select, textual evidence from your reading of the novel, our in-class viewing of the PBS documentary on Mark Twain, or Literature Circles for the novel.Include a properly formatted Works Cited page (citations are provided at the end of each article) AND incorporate internal documentation/in-text citations in your essay (see the guidelines on classroom posters; visit mla_in_text_citations_the_basics.html). Edit your essay for flow, transition, and proper use of grammar and mechanics. Follow proper MLA format for your essay (see the guidelines on classroom posters; visit research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formatting_and_style_guide/mla_general_format.html).Upload your essay to (check my website for class enrollment information).Due Date: ________________________________________________~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Name: __________________________________________________________Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ~ Response-to-Expository-Text EssayGrading Rubric _____/15 Introductory paragraph: Includes a clear thesis statement that summarizes the main point(s) of the three articles._____/10 Paragraph 2: summarizes “'Huck Finn' navigating choppy waters”.includes and analyzes one piece of textual evidence to support the author’s purpose._____/10 Paragraph 3: summarizes “Send Huck Finn to College”includes and analyzes one piece of textual evidence to support the author’s purpose._____/10 Paragraph 4: summarizes “Don’t Censor Mark Twain’s N Word” includes and analyzes one piece of textual evidence to support the author’s purpose._____/20 Concluding paragraph: student chooses one of the articles and states whether he/she agrees/disagrees with the author’s purpose/position. student supports his/her opinion with two additional pieces of evidence – textual evidence from the article, textual evidence from the novel, viewing of Mark Twain documentary, or Literature Circles._____/10 Essay contains a properly formatted Works Cited page _____/10 Essay contains appropriate internal documentation_____/15 Essay has been edited for flow, transition, and proper use of grammar and mechanics; essay follows prescribed MLA format _____/100 Points possible = ___________%Teacher Comments: 'Huck Finn' Navigating Choppy Watersby Martha T. MooreA century after his death, Mark Twain is being "sivilized" just like his hero Huck Finn.A new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn omits a racial epithet that has caused controversy since the book took its place decades ago on the shelf of great American literature. In place of the word n ———— -, which appears 219 times in Twain's text, the word "slave" will be substituted in a combined edition of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, to be published next month by NewSouth Books.Many Twain scholars can't stand it. But Alan Gribben, professor of English at Auburn University-Montgomery, says his new edition is not for them. It's for readers who cannot get past the slur to take in the rest of the book — and thereby understand Twain's opposition to racism.Teachers have told him that they cannot use the book in class because parents and students find the language "hurtful" and "injurious." At public readings, he has routinely substituted "slave," he says, and hears "an audible sigh of relief" from the audience."When the younger reader is staring at that word five times on a given page and the instructor is saying, 'Mark Twain didn't mean this and you have to read it with an appreciation of irony,' you're asking a lot of a younger reader," Gribben says.Readers will still be able to understand Twain's message without the blare of the offensive word drowning out the book's themes, Gribben says. "All I'm doing is taking out a tripwire and leaving everything else intact. All his sharp social critique, all his satirical jabs are intact. This novel cannot be made colorblind."The book has been criticized for its language and characterizations since it was first published in 1885, says Barbara Jones of the American Library Association, which tracks how often books are banned from libraries. Huckleberry Finn was among the top five books challenged or banned during the 1990s.Author Toni Morrison once wrote of the "fear and alarm" and "muffled rage" she felt during her first readings of it."Yeah, it's a tough book," says Millie Davis of the National Council for English Teachers. "Which is an excellent reason for teaching it."Word is used 'for a reason' Gribben's upcoming version of Huckleberry Finn, first reported in Publisher's Weekly, has educators and scholars readying the tar and feathers.Twain once described the difference between the almost-right word and the right word as the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. "Slave," Twain scholars say, is a firefly.Twain could have used other derogatory words of the period, such as "darky," but chose not to, they say."The word is there for a reason," says Jeff Nichols, the executive director of the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Conn. "The word is terrible, it's hurtful, but it's there for a reason," to convey the language and attitudes of Missouri in the 1840s, in a book written in the 1880s when Jim Crow laws were being passed in the South to deprive blacks of their civil rights.The new edition will also change "Injun Joe" to "Indian Joe" and "half-breed" to "half-blood.""This is what's called a slippery slope," says Robert Hirst, editor of the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California-Berkeley. He says Huckleberry Finn is best taught in college, rather than high school.Twain himself did not take kindly to editing, Hirst says. When he discovered a printer had made punctuation changes to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, he wrote that he had "given orders for the typesetter to be shot without giving him time to pray."Randall Kennedy, a Harvard Law School professor and author of a book on the history of the racial epithet in question, says that the term is historically appropriate and that "trying to erase the word from our culture is profoundly, profoundly wrong."Swapping "slave" for the epithet is not the same as, say, rewriting Chaucer from Middle English into contemporary language to make it more accessible, Kennedy says. "This isn't to make it more accessible. This is to cover up a word that hurts people's feelings and is just a very volatile word."Word can be a teaching tool Gribben argues that Twain was always willing to edit his writing to reach the widest possible market and was so sensitive to his readers' reactions that he read each day's work aloud to an audience. In the face of the rhetorical grenade that the offending word has become, "his preferences about it are moot," Gribben says. "We live in the world we live in. Our teachers teach in the world they live in."The word is hardly new to high school students, says English teacher Lindsey Franklin, who teaches Huckleberry Finn to a predominantly African-American class of 11th-graders at Eastside High School in East Gainesville, Fla. "They use it in the hallways. They hear it in music. They hear it all over the place."Seeing the word in a book required for class is something else. "It does impact students, it does make them sit up and listen," says Sally Hansen, who retired from Eastside last spring after teaching the book for 35 years. The solution, she says, is not to "change the writer — you would educate the reader" by discussing the time period in which the book is set and its language and mores."The book without that word is not Huckleberry Finn," says Jones, head of the library association's Office for Intellectual Freedom. Twain "put it there because he wanted people to struggle with it. I think, as a country, we're big enough to struggle with it."Moore, Martha T. “'Huck Finn' Navigating Choppy Waters.”?USA Today, Gannett Satellite Information Network, 6 Jan. 2011, usatoday30.life/books/2011-01-06-twain06_ST_N.htm.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Send Huck Finn to Collegeby Lorrie MooreEVER since NewSouth Books announced it would publish a version of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” with the “n-word” removed, reaction has split between traditionalists outraged at censorship and those who feel this might be a way to get teenagers, especially African-American boys, comfortable reading a literary classic. From a mother’s perspective, I think both sides are mistaken. No parent who is raising a black teenager and trying to get him to read serious fiction for his high school English class would ever argue that “Huckleberry Finn” is not a greatly problematic work. But the remedy is not to replace “nigger” with alternative terms like “slave” (the latter word is already in the novel and has a different meaning from “nigger,” so that substitution just mucks up the prose — its meaning, its voice, its verisimilitude). The remedy is to refuse to teach this novel in high school and to wait until college — or even graduate school — where it can be put in proper context. “Huckleberry Finn” is not an appropriate introduction to serious literature, and anyone who cannot see that has never tried putting an audio version of it on during a long car trip while an African-American teenager sits beside her and slowly, slowly slips on his noise-canceling earphones in order to listen to hip-hop. The derogatory word is part of the problem, but not the entirety of it — hip-hop music uses the same word. Of course, the speakers are different in each case, and the worlds they are speaking of and from are very distant from one another. The listener can tell the difference in a second. The listener knows which voice is speaking to him and which is not getting remotely close. No novel with the word “kike” or “bitch” spelled out 200 times could or should be separated — for purposes of irony or pedagogy — from the attitudes that produced those words. It’s also impossible that such a novel would be taught in a high school classroom. And if it were taught, student alienation might very well contribute to another breed of achievement gap. “Huckleberry Finn” is suited to a college course in which Twain’s obsession with the 19th-century theater of American hucksterism — the wastrel West, the rapscallion South, the economic strays and escapees of a harsh new country — can be discussed in the context of Jim’s particular story (and Huck’s). An African-American 10th grader, in someone’s near-sighted attempt to get him newly appreciative of novels, does not benefit by being taken back right then to a time when a young white boy slowly realizes, sort of, the humanity of a black man, realizes that that black man is more than chattel even if that black man is also full of illogic and stereotypical superstitions. Huck Finn refers to himself as an idiot and still finds Jim more foolish than himself. Although Twain has compassion for the affectionate Jim, he has an interest in burlesque; although he is sensitive to Jim’s heartbreaking losses, he is always looking for comedy and repeatedly holds Jim up as a figure of howling fun, ridicule that is specific to his condition as a black man. The young black American male of today, whose dignity in our public schools is not always preserved or made a priority, does not need at the start of his literary life to be immersed in an even more racist era by reading a celebrated text that exuberantly expresses everything crazy and wicked about that time — not if one’s goal is to get that teenager to like books. Huck’s voice is a complicated amalgam of idioms and perspectives and is not for the inexperienced contemporary reader. There are other books more appropriate for an introduction to serious reading. (“To Kill a Mockingbird,” with its social-class caricatures and racially na?ve narrator, is not one of them.) Sherman Alexie’s “Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” which vibrantly speaks to every teenager’s predicament when achievement in life is at odds with the demoralized condition of his peer group, is a welcoming book for boys. There must certainly be others and their titles should be shared. Teachers I meet everywhere are always asking, How can we get boys to read? And the answer is, simply, book by book. One reader’s sensitivity always sets off someone else’s defensiveness. But what would be helpful are school administrators who will break with tradition and bring more flexibility, imagination and social purpose to our high school curriculums. College, where the students have more experience with racial attitudes and literature, can do as it pleases. Lorrie Moore is the author, most recently, of the novel “A Gate at the Stairs.”Moore, Lorrie. “Send Huck Finn to College.”?The New York Times, The New York Times Company, 15 Jan. 2011, 2011/01/16/opinion/16moore.html.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Don't Censor Mark Twain's N WordBy LEONARD PITTS JR. by Leonard Pitts, Jr.It is, perhaps, the seminal moment in American literature.Young Huck Finn, trying to get right with God and save his soul from a forever of fire, sits there with the freshly written note in hand. “Miss Watson,” it says, “your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send.”Huck knows it is a sin to steal and he is whipped by guilt for the role he has played in helping the slave Jim steal himself from a poor old woman who never did Huck any harm. But see, Jim has become Huck’s friend, has sacrificed for him, worried about him, laughed and sung with him, depended upon him. So what, really, is the right thing to do? “I was a-trembling,” says Huck, “because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’ — and tore it up.”When NewSouth Books releases its new version of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn next month, that revelatory moment will contain one troubling change. Publisher’s Weekly reported last week that in this edition, edited by Twain scholar Alan Gribben of Auburn University, all 219 occurrences of the so-called N-word will be cut. Huck’s note will now call Jim a “runaway slave.” Twain’s use of the word “Injun” will also be struck.Gribben brings good intentions to this act of literary graffiti, this attempt to impose political correctness upon the most politically incorrect of American authors. He told PW that many teachers feel they can’t use the book in their classrooms because children simply cannot get past that incendiary word. “My daughter,” he said, “went to a magnet school and one of her best friends was an African-American girl. She loathed the book, could barely read it.”But while Gribben’s intentions are good, his fix is profoundly wrong. There are several reasons why.In the first place, any work of art represents a series of conscious choices on the part of the artist — what color to paint, what note to play, what word to use — in that artist’s attempt to share what is in his or her soul. The audience is free to accept or reject those choices; it is emphatically not free to substitute its own.In the second place, it is never a good idea to sugarcoat the past. The past is what it is, immutable and non-negotiable. Even a cursory glance at the historical record will show that Twain’s use of the reprehensible word was an accurate reflection of that era.So it would be more useful to have any new edition offer students context and challenge them to ask hard questions: Why did Twain choose that word? What kind of country must this have been that it was so ubiquitous? How hardy is the weed of self-loathing that many black people rationalize and justify its use, even now?I mean, has the black girl Gribben mentions never heard of Chris Rock or Snoop Dogg?Finally, and in the third place, it is troubling to think the state of reading comprehension in this country has become this wretched, that we have tweeted, PlayStationed and Fox Newsed so much of our intellectual capacity away that not only can our children not divine the nuances of a masterpiece, but that we will now protect them from having to even try.Huck Finn is a funny, subversive story about a runaway white boy who comes to locate the humanity in a runaway black man and, in the process, vindicates his own. It has always, until now, been regarded as a timeless tale.But that was before America became an intellectual backwater that would deem it necessary to censor its most celebrated author.The one consolation is that somewhere, Mark Twain is laughing his head off.Pitts, Leonard. “Don't Censor Mark Twain's N Word.”?Miami Herald, Miami Herald, 9 Jan. 2011, opinion/issues-ideas/article1937585.html. ................
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