The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain - Jonathan Arac (essay date 1997)
Jonathan Arac (essay date 1997)
SOURCE: Arac, Jonathan. “Nationalism and Hypercanonization.” In Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time pp. 133-153 Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.
[In the following essay, Arac disputes the idea that Huckleberry Finn, is emblematic of quintessential “American” values.]
THE NATIONALIZATION OF LITERARY NARRATIVE
I am not an Americanist by professional formation, and as in the 1980s I came to focus my teaching and reading in American literature, I was struck by what seemed to me, compared with other national literatures I knew or had studied, a state of hypercanonization. By hypercanonization I mean that a very few individual works monopolize curricular and critical attention: in fiction preeminently The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, and Huckleberry Finn. These works organize innumerable courses in high school, college,...
[The entire page is 14198 words long]
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