roachboy

well, like i said, i am not a fan of the edit(s) because they fuck up the way the lines scan--the sound is wrong---and twain's sentences are often really carefully constructed at the level of sound.

my main point was that it's not just some ill-considered feel-good p.c. move.
that's why i think the foreword is important, because it raises most of the questions that the thread is cycling through and addresses them.
some of them are deceptively complex, like what "fidelity to context" actually means. which context? the foreword uses clemens biography as a context to make problematic the synchronic contexts---which are also a bit odd, really---what exactly is "the" context for something that takes as long to construct as a novel? the period of it's construction? the moment it's published? it's reception and its history?

often literature people are like art historians---context is basically zeitgeist which is made up of x simultaneous phenomenon in a frame where simultaneous is defined as "other things i want to talk about from roughly the same time-frame"---which is why zeitgeist is so useful, because it's some vaporous "spirit of the times"...

but i digress.


btw the edition is not a bowlderization--it publishes tom sawyer and husk finn together, restores a scene that had been deleted and is in every other way a faithful reproduction of the original.

so that's wrong.

and it's not a matter of faciltating comprehension---the editor's argument (gapping on his name) is that it enables an encounter with the texts at all.

there's a side of me that's kinda sympathetic to the backstory of the edit---even as i'm not a fan of the edit itself----have you ever taught a text with racist or fascist language in a class? or even a text with kinds of violence in them that make the students uncomfortable? there's a real decision you have to make as a teacher about whether it's worth it to simply roll over that stuff....if you don't then you have to talk about it...often you find out that some of the students anyway didnt read the piece because of that. if the text in question is important, then a second decision is whether the thing that offends is important or not and what you do with that in class. that was the start of the edit.

i think my students were most offended when i made them read william s burrough's the ticket that exploded. but there the problems were entirely different. and i enjoyed the way they were offended. little fucking prudes.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite