Read
Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth. “Is ‘Huck Finn’ Still Relevant? Revisiting ‘The Case for Conflict.’”
The English Journal 106, no. 2 (2016): 85–87. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26450215.
If the direct login link doesn’t work- search the Brooklyn College Library directly.
What do you think?
Over this and the last module, you’ve seen a few different approaches to ‘problematic’ literature:
- Rudyard Kipling: mostly his books have fallen away to the history of time, except for The Jungle Book in its Disney film version.
- Doctor Dolittle: Bowdelerizing the text to make it ‘acceptable’ OR adapting it so that only the name and talking to the animals remain.
- Disney Plus: Adding a content warning
- Peter Pan: Reworking in ways that the character(s) have come to have a distinct life removed from their origin texts.
- Little Black Sambo: Total Bans or efforts to reclaim the story.
What do you think of these various materials? Were you familiar with any of them in some form? Were there things to like about the different pieces that you read even though there were problems? Do you see nostalgia as playing a role in this? What do you think we should do with problematic art and culture?
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