Making Mark Twain Work in the Classroom - Softcover

Leonard, James S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822322978 ISBN 13: 9780822322979

Verlag: Duke University Press, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

How does one teach Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, a book as controversial as it is central to the American literary canon? This collection of essays edited by James S. Leonard offers practical classroom methods for instructors dealing with the racism, the casual violence, and the role of women, as well as with structural and thematic discrepancies in the works of Mark Twain.
The essays in Making Mark Twain Work in the Classroom reaffirm the importance of Twain in the American literature curriculum from high school through graduate study. Addressing slavery and race, gender, class, religion, language and ebonics, Americanism, and textual issues of interest to instructors and their students, the contributors offer guidance derived from their own demographically diverse classroom experiences. Although some essays focus on such works as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and The Innocents Abroad, most discuss the hotly debated Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, viewed alternately in this volume as a comic masterpiece or as evidence of Twain's growing pessimism-but always as an effective teaching tool.
By placing Twain's work within the context of nineteenth-century American literature and culture, Making Mark Twain Work in the Classroom will interest all instructors of American literature. It will also provoke debate among Americanists and those concerned with issues of race, class, and gender as they are represented in literature.

Contributors. Joseph A. Alvarez, Lawrence I. Berkove, Anthony J. Berret, S.J., Wesley Britton, Louis J. Budd, James E. Caron, Everett Carter, Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua, Pascal Covici Jr., Beverly R. David, Victor Doyno, Dennis W. Eddings, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, S. D. Kapoor, Michael J. Kiskis, James S. Leonard, Victoria Thorpe Miller, Stan Poole, Tom Reigstad, David E. E. Sloane, David Tomlinson

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James S. Leonard is Professor of English at The Citadel. He is coauthor of The Fluent Mundo: Wallace Stevens and the Structure of Reality and coeditor of Satire or Evasion? Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn, also published by Duke University Press.

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"A wonderful tool. This volume offers a wealth of resources from a range of critical perspectives."--Steven Mailloux, University of California, Irvine

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Making Mark Twain Work in the Classroom

By James S. Leonard

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1999 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-2297-9

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Who's Teaching Mark Twain, and How?, 
I Discovering Mark Twain, 
From Innocence to Death: An Approach to Teaching Twain, 
Race and Mark Twain, 
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc in Today's Classroom, 
Parody and Satire as Explorations of Culture in The Innocents Abroad, 
Connecticut Yankee: Twain's Other Masterpiece, 
A Connecticut Yankee in the Postmodern Classroom, 
Opportunity Keeps Knocking: Mark Twain Scholarship for the Classroom, 
II Rediscovering Huckleberry Finn, 
"Huckleberry Fun", 
Huck's Helplessness: A Reader's Response to Stupefied Humanity, 
Teaching Huckleberry Finn: The Uses of the Last Twelve Chapters, 
"Blame de Pint! I Reck'n I Knows what I Knows." Ebonics, Jim, and New Approaches to, 
Understanding Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 
The Challenge of Teaching Huckleberry Finn, 
Huck Finn's Library: Reading, Writing, and Intertextuality, 
The Relationship of Kemble's Illustrations to Mark Twain's Text: Using Pictures to Teach, 
Huck Finn, 
Using Audiovisual Media to Teach Huckleberry Finn, 
High-Tech Huck: Teaching Undergraduates by Traditional Methods and with Computers, 
III Playing to the Audience, 
The Innocents Abroad Travels to Freshman Composition, 
On Teaching Huck in the Sophomore Survey, 
To Justify the Ways of Twain to Students: Teaching Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to, 
Culturally Diverse Students in an Urban Southern Community College, 
"Pretty Ornery Preaching": Huckleberry Finn in the Church-Related College, 
"When I Read this Book as a Child ... the Ugliness was Pushed Aside": Adult Students, 
Read and Respond to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 
Contributors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Discovering Mark Twain

From Innocence to Death: An Approach to Teaching Twain

Dennis W. Eddings

A course in Mark Twain, especially on the undergraduate level, presents an instructor with a decided problem. Cantankerously messy, Twain refuses tidy pigeonholing or typecasting. Thus the problem: while a specific thesis approach tends to reduce Twain's richness, some organizing principle beyond mere chronology is needed to help illuminate that richness. One resolution that I have found effective involves tracing the development of what I see as the four major stages of Twain's career through the correlative themes of freedom and the search for a place where such freedom may be realized. While this approach obviously requires selectivity in the works considered and a bit of juggling to make everything fit together, it nonetheless provides a flexible framework that establishes an opening for discussion of Twain's major works as well as helping students see the continuity and development of his career. I emphasize that this approach provides a frame for discussion, not the entire focus of the class. I identify works that are not part of the syllabus, including ones that do not fit neatly into this scheme, and encourage students to examine these on their own (term papers abet that encouragement). Using this frame as a starting point, consideration then ranges freely over many other issues and concerns that make up Twain's complex art.

The first stage of this remarkable career involves creating and exploring the thematic and comic possibilities of the Innocent, the authorial persona of the youthful Mark Twain, and the search for a place capable of providing the necessary freedom to realize that character. I begin with Roughing It, primarily because it treats the Innocent more complexly than does Innocents Abroad, but also because students, especially in the Western states, tend to respond to it more favorably. Twain's removal to Nevada enables him to sample many roles and characters, including timber entrepreneur (and inadvertent arsonist), miner, and reporter. No such choices exist in Missouri. The closing of the Mississippi by Union forces during the Civil War represents a closing off of the freedom to enjoy the role that Twain appears to have found in "Old Times on the Mississippi." Moving west, away from the constraints of the world he has known, liberates him, accounting for the lyric description of the crossing of the plains.

In Nevada, the Innocent apparently finds a world of possibility—thus the many roles he tests. Yet even this early in Twain's career we encounter a duality that haunts his work—the positive assertion of the necessity of freedom and the negative assertion that nowhere on earth does such freedom exist. Individual episodes in the book, as well as its overall structure, reveal this duality. For example, the Innocent moves constantly westward, even to the apparent island paradise of Hawaii. But even there we see the pattern of disillusionment so prevalent in the book. Eden once again proves illusory. Belying the tropical beauty of the Hawaiian Islands' physical setting, Hawaiian history presents an ancient, vast panorama of pagan superstition and bloody butchery.

From this perspective, Roughing It becomes very important in any consideration of Twain's career. Thirteen years before the appearance of Huckleberry Finn, the book insinuates that, despite Huck's assertion, there really is no territory to light out to. That realization, however, presented a problem for Twain. In Roughing It he had found his authorial persona and the character through which that persona could be explored and developed. Yet that character had no place to go after Hawaii; Twain had run out of frontier. His solution to this dilemma takes him to the close of his first stage while opening the door to the second.

In "Old Times on the Mississippi," Twain responds to the knowledge gained in the end of Roughing It by traveling backward through memory rather than forward through space. Going back into the past enables him to retain a type of prelapsarian world that negates the lessons of his Western tour, evidenced by the transformation of the Innocent into the Cub. In that world, the creation of "Mark Twain" continues, exaggerating even more that persona's innocence and the inevitable humiliation arising from it.

Despite their widely different subject matter, "Old Times" resonates with echoes of Roughing It. At the beginning of the work, Twain again finds himself deprived of one role and in search of another. He transforms the plains into the river and the stagecoach into the boat, creating another fluid world of apparent possibility and freedom. In that world, he again attempts to assume a specific role, this time that of the magisterial pilot, the one (not insignificantly) in control. And again, naïve expectations clash with harsh reality, leading to laughter for the reader and, gradually, knowledge for the Cub.

As with the knowledge inherent in Roughing It, the knowledge in "Old Times" contains a dark implication that Twain refuses to acknowledge overtly. No one, it appears, enjoys such freedom as a river-boat pilot—he commands all, subject to neither captain nor owner. Such freedom from authority, however, exists only in the tiny confines of the pilot house. Outside, the river rules. The pilot, confronted with a constantly changing river, must always relearn lessons, only to discard them and start over. Apparently a place where freedom exists, the river actually represents a world of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822322978
• ISBN 13: 9780822322979
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 328
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland