Criticism
Huck Finn has been one of the most-challenged books in the USA, both for exposing the ignorance and racism of the South and (paradoxically) for being racist itself. Craig Lancto, then education editor of World&I magazine, wrote:
- Nigger is an ugly word that ignites strong feelings and diminishes both speaker and hearer. Of course, neither Huck nor Tom meant it in a derogatory way. It was what they heard adults of their day say. Their behavior did not reflect racism, but those who would ban the book because of it rob students of the opportunity to discover that Twain was not a racist. Instead, they exacerbate racial tensions by finding racism where it does not exist.
Read more about this topic: Huckleberry Finn
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“A tailor can adapt to any medium, be it poetry, be it criticism. As a poet, he can mend, and with the scissors of criticism he can divide.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)