Mark Twain

In this chapter I examine the writings of Mark Twain on lying, especially his essays  "On the decay of the Art of Lying" and "My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It." I show that Twain held that there were two kinds of lies: the spoken lie and the silent lie. The silent lie is the lie of not saying what one is thinking, and is far more common than the spoken lie. The greatest silent lies, according to Twain, were the national silent lies that there was nothing wrong with slavery (the U.S.), that there was nothing wrong with the prosecution of Alfred Dreyfus (France), and that there was nothing wrong with imperialism (UK). According to Twain, lying is unavoidable. Since lying is unavoidable, one must simply avoid injurious lies, and tell beneficial lies.

This book contains a tour that I gave as a historic interpreter at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut. It takes the readers from the front lawn to the porch to the hall, then goes room by room throughout the author's family home, telling the story of the wonderful life they all lived in a house that felt alive to them for seventeen years.

I did this for several years, and it enabled me to learn all about the author and his family, and to read many of his works. It also led me to meet many fascinating and fun members of the public as I showed them around and told them hilarious, uproarious tales of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain, in the manner of a stand-up comic. They loved it, as did I.

Many of these visitors made a wonderful remark to me at the conclusion of tour after tour after tour: "That was the best tour I have ever had anywhere. I wish I could buy a copy of it. You should write your tour down, as is." So, I did.

Fake news is hardly new in journalism, and a sense of historical perspective is clarifying. A thumbnail history in Columbia Journalism Review has pointed to some superficial similarities in hoaxing over the ages “in editorial motive or public gullibility, not to mention the blurred lines between deliberate and accidental flimflam.” It cautions that “the great fake news panic of 2016” is an overreaction to “macro-level trends” that do not indicate real, significant changes in the media. But before agreeing to shrug off the significance of this recent spate of hoaxing, it is worth reviewing the history more carefully.

For the last 2,500 years literature has been attacked, booed, and condemned, often for the wrong reasons and occasionally for very good ones. ‘The Hatred of Literature’ examines the evolving idea of literature as seen through the eyes of its adversaries: philosophers, theologians, scientists, pedagogues, and even leaders of modern liberal democracies. From Plato to C. P. Snow to Nicolas Sarkozy, literature’s haters have questioned the value of literature―its truthfulness, virtue, and usefulness―and have attempted to demonstrate its harmfulness.

Literature does not start with Homer or Gilgamesh, William Marx says, but with Plato driving the poets out of the city, like God casting Adam and Eve out of Paradise. That is its genesis. From Plato the poets learned for the first time that they served not truth but merely the Muses. It is no mere coincidence that the love of wisdom (philosophia) coincided with the hatred of poetry. Literature was born of scandal, and scandal has defined it ever since.

In the long rhetorical war against literature, Marx identifies four indictments―in the name of authority, truth, morality, and society. This typology allows him to move in an associative way through the centuries. In describing the misplaced ambitions, corruptible powers, and abysmal failures of literature, anti-literary discourses make explicit what a given society came to expect from literature. In this way, anti-literature paradoxically asserts the validity of what it wishes to deny. The only threat to literature’s continued existence, Marx writes, is not hatred but indifference.


TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Words from Elsewhere
First Trial: Authority
Second Trial: Truth
Third Trial: Morality
Fourth Trial: Society
Conclusion
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

This essay draws its title from a Mark Twain quotation – “Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand” – that is probably quite familiar to many who study the relation of humour and politics. Encapsulating a specific attitude towards humour, and in particular the political possibilities of humour, this line is frequently evoked in the context of arguments regarding the ability of humour to constitute a form of transgressive or even radical politics that questions, challenges and critiques existing structures of power. What is often over-looked in these citations, though, is that in its original context, Twain’s unfinished novel The Mysterious Stranger, the line is not only spoken by a highly morally ambiguous character, the nephew of Satan (himself also confusingly named Satan), but that shortly after the same character declares that humanity has only a “mongrel perception of humor (sic), nothing more.” Humanity, Satan declares, “lack[s] sense and the courage” to use humour as a “really effective weapon.” Eager to celebrate the political work of humour, Twain’s Satan’s caveats are often overlooked by theorists and commentators who instead take up Twain’s quotation almost as a form of argument by proverb that demonstrates the radical, critical potential of humour. In contrast to that tendency, in this essay I seek to focus on these disruptive details as a lens through which to re-examine the political potential often ascribed to humour and, in particular, the theoretical construction of humour as a form of critique.

El estudio de los signos, o semiótica, constituye una útil herramienta de análisis de los fenómenos sociales. Esta disciplina ayuda a entender la manera en que los repertorios culturales específicos de cada sociedad determinan sus visiones de la realidad. En consonancia con la importancia de estas cuestiones, diferentes programas académicos han incorporen en sus currículos contenidos pertenecientes a este campo. Éstos, sin embargo, son con frecuencia difíciles de abordar. El presente artículo tiene como finalidad ayudar a vencer este obstáculo, presentando una forma de graficar conceptos básicos de la teoría de los signos, a partir de la literatura.

In 1859, New York journalist Horace Greeley hurried across the Sierra and consequently inspired a popular legend. The narrative celebrated western abilities above eastern arrogance. Artemus Ward, a famous comic writer, published a version of the story, which was eventually read in Congress. Mark Twain took it to another level, adapting the legend for stage and print and providing an early example of what Michael Dylan Foster and Jeffrey Tolbert recently described as "folkloresque."

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is one of Mark Twain’s most famous book. It was released in 1876 and is set in the fictional city of St. Petersburg. In the book, superstition is present in the faithful believe of Tom, Huckleberry, and many other characters. This analysis aims to show the use of superstition in the story as a means to characterize characters and their beliefs, based on the concept by Professor Alexander Lesser presented in an article of The Journal of Philosophy in 1931.

My essay is an attempt to compliment Huck Finn and his adventures. On the other hand, it does so based, not only on my reading response to the story, but also on my experience as a temporary lecturer of American Literature for undergraduate students, at the Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ). When we teach The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, this novel can also teach us back worthy issues, such as literary realism, non-standard language, tall tales, humor, religion, slavery, rebellion, and friendship.

"Meaning, if Twain’s views regarding the rights of woman and gender inequality had shifted over the course of his literary career, this change would inherently appear in the reader’s perception of Pudd’nhead Wilson, based solely on the possibilities of the literary medium per se. One aspect of the novel’s narrative form is its “flexibility,” part of which allots the novel the capacity to be “immediately responsive to patterns of cultural change” (Frye 433). It should be further noted that even though the novel as a literary medium or form is incredibly prevalent today, it has had a historical and prominent association with women, and that even in Twain’s time, women associated with the novel in greater numbers, both as writers and readers. Most of Twain’s male literary contemporaries, with certain exceptions, opted for philosophical prose or experimented with poetry, short story, and essay. When we consider other major contributors to the canon of early American literature, men constitute the majority of the canon’s notable figures, such as Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and so on. Most of the novelists in this canon, also with certain exceptions, tend to be women, notably Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louisa May Alcott. Surely, then, one claim for the novel’s feminist possibilities stems from the novel’s popularity and frequency amongst the female reader and writer. Imagine, for example, the way in which one of Twain’s female contemporaries may have alternatively perceived Pudd’nhead Wilson, particularly if that woman had also read “In Defense…” or had a history of reading female-centric or female-authored novels, as was characteristic of that time. "

Temas como el racismo, la esclavitud, las supersticiones y la moral sureña son centrales en la novela de Twain, los cuales desarrollaremos a lo largo de este ensayo, en el que trataremos las ideas de Foucault acerca del poder, de la autonomía del individuo y los epistemes que envuelven a la sociedad; en este caso, será la sociedad sureña de los Estados Unidos, en el periodo previo a la Guerra Civil, representados en la novela de Mark Twain "Las aventuras de Huckleberry Finn".

In this course, we will examine the works of prominent American writers from the Civil War to the present. Students will be expected to understand the works of individual writers, literary movements, intellectual developments, and thematic concerns. There will be six quizzes (only five will count), four paragraph assignments, and three exams. Course Requirements: Quizzes 20 (six quizzes, each worth four points. Only five will count.) Exam #1 20 Exam #2 20 Exam #3 20 Paragraph assignments 20 (four paragraphs, each worth five points) Grading Scale: 100-94=A, 93-90=A-, 89-87=B+, 86-84=B, 83-80=B-, … Course Goals: Successfully completing this course means sufficiently mastering the following skills (they appear in no particular order): *critical and close reading *analysis (textual and otherwise) *writing with clarity *clear and logical organization on all levels *thesis development *effective use of a variety of evidence types *development of logical arguments *audience analysis *polished writing free of basic grammatical errors *an understanding of what constitutes plagiarism

Friedrich Nietzsche, Mark Twain, and Joseph Conrad all came to the same conclusion at roughly the same time: that a discourse of morality, rather than promoting the social good, actually sets the stage for human rights abuses.  In this essay, I show how Twain replaces morality with a discourse of intimacy in his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

This essay examines the commentary by Mark Twain on Hawai‘i —not only in “Following the Equator” but also in letters written to the New York Tribune in 1872, “Letters from the Sandwich Islands” (1866) and his first lecture “Our Fellow Savages from the Sandwich Islands” (1866)—as the deep background to Clemens’s thinking about colonialism and American empire at the turn of the century. What I show is how his representations of Hawai‘i serve as a prelude to the scathing tone of a late satire, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.”

In December 1877, Sam Clemens participated in the public celebration of John Greenleaf Whittier’s seventieth birthday staged by the publisher of The Atlantic Monthly. The story he told has been stigmatized by William Dean Howells as “that hideous mistake of poor Clemens,” and the memory of it for Clemens was apparently so fraught with anxiety and uncertainty about the propriety of telling the tale that it has been referred to it as a primal scene of Mark Twain criticism. Thus, many analyses of the speech and its aftermath investigate the personal stakes for Sam Clemens with a psychoanalytical undercurrent. The other focal point for analysis has been what Mark Twain’s Whittier birthday speech implies for American culture. This essay shows that these disparate focal points name two sides of the same performance of satire rather than advance competing interpretations. Rather than investigate the event as a primal scene that generates a personal story of identity crisis, I will stress the symbolism of cultural processes that enable a narrative of literary history. The speech and reactions to it function as a drama that symbolically enacted American literary culture in 1877.

Tom Sawyer is one of those transcendent literary characters who go beyond the simply iconic and enter the realm of myth. His statue stands alongside his best friend, Huckleberry Finn, in Mark Twain’s childhood home, Hannibal, Missouri (erected in 1926, it’s one of the first, if not the first, statues of a non-religious fictional character), and together these larger-than-life figures tower over the development of the modern American novel. He’s been portrayed in 25 films and TV shows to date (the last as recently as 2016), and when the producers of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen wanted an American fictional icon to join Alan Moore’s pantheon of British literary heroes, he was the instant and obvious choice. Then there are the plays, the comics, the videogames, the musicals, and, even, the ballet… 

For boys, especially, he’s the hero of the book you read and loved as a kid because your dad recommended it, as his probably had before him. (Mine certainly did.) And you might have started out wondering what a novel set in the American South of the 1840s could possibly have to do with your life, until you started to read and were instantly drawn in. This is because, at heart, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a celebration of childhood – well, boyhood – and that’s a universal human experience, whenever and wherever it happens. You can read it as a kid and identify with Tom and Huck, Sid, Mary, Becky Thatcher and the rest of the gang. You can read it again as a parent and see your own children in them: the elaborate imaginative play, the fluid, capricious allegiances, the hilariously half-understood adult world, the crushing and instantly forgotten heartbreaks, the vital trivia, and, above all, the anarchy. Maybe he’s been supplanted by Harry Potter these days, but it should be remembered that they’d likely be no Harry without Tom.

Dalla fine all'inizio; dalla letteratura al cinema; da un racconto breve di sole 59 pagine alla sceneggiatura di un film lungo 166 minuti; dal 1922, pubblicazione del racconto, al 2008, uscita del film; dai titoli di testa alle cascate di bottoni colorati che compongono i loghi delle case di produzione cinematografica.
Tutti questi contrapposti mutamenti per raccontare dell'invisibile ma chiaramente esperibile protagonista principale del film Il curioso caso di Benjamin Button, come anche protagonista principale della vita dell'Uomo: il Tempo!
Un film imponente ed epico, al contempo intimo e privato, struggente e malinconico, emozionante e da ricordare.
Un film che attraversa il XX secolo, dalla fine della prima guerra mondiale, nel 1918, giorno in cui nasce Benjamin Button, per affacciarsi sul XXI, sino all'anno in cui è girato, il 2006.
Un film che utilizza un paradosso temporale, per raccontare la vita di Benjamin, lasciando sullo sfondo il dipanarsi della storia americana di questo periodo.
Un film che mette in evidenza l'effetto del tempo sulla vita dell'Uomo, per ricordare che è mutamento, continuo, incessante.
Nel 2009 il film è candidato a tredici premi Oscar quasi un record, guadagna tre statuette, per la scenografia, il trucco e gli effetti speciali.

In 1938 the distinguished American historian Russel B. Nye published a fascinating short article in the Ohio History Journal speculating that the inspiration for Hadleyburg came from a disappointing visit Twain made to Oberlin, Ohio, on February 11, 1885, when the audience assembled the First Congregational Church gave him a prudish and chilly reception.  Twain had undertaken a reading tour to celebrate the appearance of his new novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published that very year.  He invited his new friend George Washington Cable to join him on the lecture circuit.  In general, the two paired well together and their national tour was a resounding success.  But at Oberlin a surprising event occurred:  Cable’s portion of the reading was judged by the audience to be hugely successful, Twain’s much less so.  Nye’s article offers intriguing but incomplete evidence as to why the majority of Oberlinians in attendance didn’t take to Twain—evidence that I will to supplement here.  Nye also makes the provocative suggestion, which I support, that Twain may have decided to take a measure of revenge on Oberlin by inventing a tale about a small town’s stubbornness and self-righteousness.

Being human is seeking knowledge and being perceptive, soul, mind
and body. Today it seems that we can mimic this perceptiveness
through technical advancements in the field of Artificial Intelligence
(AI). The future can hold further developments in the field of robotics
and this mere mimicry of lifelike attributes might one day become an
inherent learning pattern; where just like humans, or anything alive,
these machines might become perceptive learners.

This attribute of being perceptive is highly associated with self-reflection viz. self-questioning, such as: ‘What should I do?’, ‘Why should I do it?’, and
most importantly ‘Who am I?’, ‘Where do we come from?’, and ‘Where do
we go?’. To this, humans would act rationally and emotionally in accordance with a presumed universal moral law. What if in the future these machines that have become perceptive learners ask the same questions? If they do ask these fundamental questions of self-awareness, would they become human?

In the second half of the twentieth century, attitudes towards the acceptability of racist discourse against African Americans changed significantly. Thus, especially in the USA, many literary works containing such discourse were accused of racism. However, in countries with no direct experience of these racial issues, the perception of such works may be different. Focusing on the Slovenian translations of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) (one of the books most frequently challenged on the grounds of racism), I shall try to determine whether domestic or foreign political and social changes during Slovenia’s socialist era had any significant effect on how racist discourse was translated. In the case of translation shifts, the possible effects on the readers’ perception of the addressed issues are discussed.

Tom Sawyer in his own story changes to a very different Tom Sawyer in “Huckleberry Finn.” Tom in Huck’s story foreshadows Tom Driscoll in “The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson.” Both Toms together suggest how Tom Sawyer’s last name can be read as a satiric archetype; both Toms are sawyers, moral snags representing disruptions of social order. Place this symbolic figure into its equally symbolic setting, the country village, and one can begin to conceptualize what I call Mark Twain’s satiric ur-narrative, a template tale the key iterations of which include these three narratives concerned with antebellum slave culture.