In this installment we look at another of the most iconic of GANs, Mark Twain's 1885 "bad boy" novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Written over an eight-year period, what began as a sequel to the mischievous "bad boy" book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) steepened into a caustic interrogation of racism in the United States. Twain's depiction of the relationship between the naive sprite Huck and the runaway slave Jim at once appeals to the American desire for harmonious race relations while probing blindspots in our national notions of equality. Twain employs several motifs associated with GANs---the journey, the river, the notion of the moral education--but at its core is a satirical impulse to question manners, pretentions, and aristocracies. Our discussion explores Twain's use of vernacular, the controversies surrounding both the prodigious use of the N-word and the final section of the novel (in which Tom and Huck play pranks on Jim instead of rescuing him from slavery), and what it means for our cultural notions of maturity that men want to "light out for the Territory" to avoid being "sivilized."
Episode 28: Falling off the Cliff with The Catcher in the Rye
Episode 27: Filtering the Static in Don DeLillo's WHITE NOISE
Episode 26: Seekers of the Lonely Heart: Carson McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Episode 25: Surmising the Motives in Henry James's THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
Episode 24: Speeding Down the Highway with PLAY IT AS IT LAYS by Joan Didion
Episode 23: Hearing Voices in William Faulkner's AS I LAY DYING
Episode 22: Rambling Along the REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
Defining Dignity through Service in Ernest J. Gaines' A LESSON BEFORE DYING
Episode 20: Cracking Through the Scrub with THE YEARLING
Episode 19: Riding the Rocket with Thomas Pynchon's GRAVITY'S RAINBOW
Episode 18: We Want to Fly Away with Chopin's THE AWAKENING
Ep 17: Pursuing the Picaro in Saul Bellow's THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH
Episode 16: Classics of American Noir
Searching for the Ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck's THE GRAPES OF WRATH
Episode 14: Ride into the sun--Cormac McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN
Homing in on the Prairie with Willa Cather's My Ántonia
Episode 12: Hitting the Road with LOLITA
The Everyday Ecstasy of Marilynne Robinsone's GILEAD
Episode 10: Finding the Lost Generation in Hemingway's THE SUN ALSO RISES
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