ENG250Y1 Lecture : ENG250 - November 14 - Mark Twain.docx
Document Summary
Huck and jim fit right into this theme because they are nobody. Jim is literally and legally a nobody since he"s a slave: huck is "white trash" In a basic sense they give us another idea of what it is to be a nobody. To get a sense of myself, i have to understand the larger society. In self-reliance, emerson speaks against quoting from authoritative sources but in doing that he does what he"s against. Whitman"s leaves of grass doesn"t represent someone who is as detached as he would like to be. Huck finn presents this in a literary form, has a paradoxical status: at the one hand is antagonistic to high culture but is taken as the epitome of the best of american culture. Newspapers challenged what it is that we feel the public needs to know. The boom/bust economy is very central to the novel because it was the society that twain himself lived in.
