Jason+Halmo

Mark Twain Topic: Twain Changed Literature forever through the use of wit, Humor and wisdom Thesis: Twain added a new genre to literature, satire literature. His work began the criticism of the civil war, slavery and american goverment. His worked changed literature by critising the american goverment in a new semi-fictional way. Source: 1 (web) Reuben, Paul P. "Chapter 5: Late Nineteenth Century - Mark Twain." //PAL: Perspectives in American Literature- A Research and Reference Guide//. [|URL:http://web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap5/twain.html] 27, April,2010 1. "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. if you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." - Ernest Hemingway, //Green Hills of Africa,// 1935 2.One of the great writers of American literature, Twain is admired for capturing typical American experiences in a language which is realistic and charming. 3. The first writer to write what he thinks without fear of consequences 4.A remarkable achievement of the book is Clemens' use of American humor, folklore, slang, and dialects. 5.In 1847 he became a jounalist 6. After being a soilder he became a writer at a local newspaper, where he displayed his unique writing skills. 7. His humor was a complement to the life of virginians 8.In 1863 Samuel assumed the pseudonym Mark Twain, a Mississippi phrase which meant two fathoms deep. 9.Twain's literary success culminated in 1865, when the //New York Saturday Press// published "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County 10.Twain had revealed his propensity for dry humor and readers consumed it greedily. 11. Nothing before huck finn was as great and influencal as that book 12. Born November 30, 1835 13.1850 became employed by his brother Orion, a struggling entrepreneur who owned the //Western Union// newspaper in Hannibal (Miller 5). 14.first humorous story, "The Dandy Frightening the Squatter 15.Twain had established himself as a literary force to be reckoned with. If nothing else, he had paved the way for the influx of books to follow. 16.his visits to France, Italy, and the Holy Land would provide him with ample opportunity to satirize European culture. 17.1869 until 1889. It was during this period of time that he produced such classics as, //The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Tramp Abroad,// //Life on the Mississippi//, and the pivotal //The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.// 18.experience with bankruptcy forced him to conduct lectures as a means of income, and this reversal in fortune seemed to affect his personal philosophy as well. 19.Twain referred to this limitations, "and this makes it my duty...to be fair to it" 20.Critics of Twain often refer to an underlying purpose lurking beneath the cloak of satire. Source 2( acedmic journals) Sloan, Karen. "Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." //The Explicator// 63.3 (2005): 159+. //General OneFile//. Web. 29 21.Repeatedly explored the race question after the Civil War 22. rejected popular opinion that the wounds of the Civil War were too fresh and emotions too high to "philosophize the events of the great struggle" in the pages of fiction 23.Twain called America's response to both antebellum slavery and postbellum racism "the silent colossal National Lie" 24.Twain understood that writing universal freedom and justice into a nation's constitution does not necessarily inscribe it onto that nation's social conscience 25.Twain's heavy satire is directed at Huck's comments, not Jim's. Jim understands that "the real pint"--the one Twain wishes to make--"is down furder--it's down deeper 26.Twain metaphorically represents by allowing Jim to equate the value of half a child to the worthless half a dollar bill. 30.Trapped in a system whose civil and moral codes fail to distinguish between a human life and a piece of property, Jim asks, "what's de use er dat half a bill?--can't buy noth'n wid it. En what use is a half a chile 31.Twain overwrites Jim's parody with the sobering reminder that the dispute over slavery was about freedom and justice, both of which are as surely eviscerated by halfway measures as a child who is literally cut in two 32.The Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments may have legally declared the freedom of blacks, but increased lynchings, the crop-lien system, the convict-lease system. 33.Twain's perception that two decades after the Civil War, "liberty and justice for all" were still--to borrow a phrase from Pudd'nhead Wilson--"a fiction of law and custom" Source 3 (acedemic Journal) Champion, Laurie. "Persona and Humor in Mark Twain's Early Writings." //Studies in the Novel// 29.2 (1997): 252+. //General OneFile//. Web. 29 Apr. 2010. 34.Twain achieved fluidity as a literary self by 1872 and maintained it throughout his career" 35.Twain's early career, from his western journalism through The Innocents Abroad to Roughing It, is his development into a versatile, humorous persona who can surmount the polarities and disjunctions of life" 36. Twain implies that both Easterners and Westerners engage in fantasies that pervade language and perspective. Source 4 (web) Chew, Robin. "Mark Twain." November 1995.http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/95nov/twain.html (accessed April 29,2010). 37.Some modern readers are offended by some of the language and content of Twain's books 38. His contemporary use of language influenced many american writers 39.Twain's life and career progressed he became increasingly pessimistic, losing much of the humorous, cocky tone of his earlier years. More and more of his work expressed the gloomy view that all human motives are ultimately selfish. 40. Twain was liberal on racial and many social issues. The underlying themes of "Huckleberry Finn" support a fundamental equality for people of all races. Source 5 (acedemic Journal) Briden, Earl F. "Persona and Humor in Mark Twain's Early Writings." //College Literature// 25.2 (1998): 154+. //General OneFile//. Web. 29 Apr. 2010. 41.the pseudonymous comic identity that samuel clemens created early in 1863. 42. Twain corpus; it also represents the tentative first step in the development of the writer's - and America's - greatest comic invention 43.a figure who would ultimately take on mythic proportions 44.The idea of Mark twain as comic artifact and project underlies these four books 45. his fame outlasted that of his fellow comedians because they were "merely" humorists, whereas he "always preached": 46.If the humor came of its own accord and uninvited, I have allowed it a place in my sermon, but I was not writing the sermon for the sake of the humor" but vice versa 47. Twain's humor and morality are categorically distinct and, worse, that his humor is essentially a secondary, value-neutral matter. 48. Twainian humor constitutes a compelling reality of its own 49.reading Twain often means an exhilarating loss of contact with the safe 50. reinvents Mark Twain by situating him in a definitive context and focusing attention upon a distinctive dimension of his humor 51.Twain developed the fluidity of voice and perspective that would characterize his writing for the rest of his career. 52.Twain's literary personality is a product of the two sustained confrontations of these early years: first, with the American West, then with the Old World of Europe and the Holy Land. 53.subverting humor running throughout Twain's work, which thus echoes the general intellectual and cultural turmoil 54.Twain as an American type implicated in his culture's attitudes toward gender, race, and social class belongs  55. He also breaks down the humor-sermon polarity, locating Twain's sermons in his humor 56.exhilarating freedom to rise above such conditions through a humorous consciousness that fashions its own identity and world. 57.who uses the plasticity of humor to unsettle our notions of a fixed world 58.groped his way toward this protean figure of multiple, shifting viewpoints, he encountered problems 59. Twain confronted the unsettling hoaxes 60.partly of Twain's exasperation at the absence of any secure standard of truth 61.avoiding fixity by the humorous technique of fashioning his own playful associations of emotion and thought for Old World artifacts 62.thereby achieving "humorous transcendence" over the kinds of frustrations 63.Twain also rewrites himself in this process; and in achieving an ever-altering persona 64.as rambunctious, anarchic, changeful, and, above all, uncontainable. Whether as text, persona, or myth 65. Twain's art registers his abiding fears of stasis, especially in the form of culturally-inflicted selfhood 66.Twain finds his representation of life and the human condition, 67.Twain was indeed rehearsing themes for his masterwork 68.Huck is Twain's most memorable character 69.Twain even worried about the fixity of identity implicit in verbal expression itself 70. Twain valorizes fluidity, a shape-shifting freedom dear to Americans who, like their favorite humorist, 71.Twain's humor confronts and transcends fixity, rigidity, serf-typification 72.Twain valorizes fluidity, a shape-shifting freedom dear to Americans who, like their favorite humorist, 73.his style, which is complex and demanding, partly with his study's level of ambition 74. Twain's early works grow out of a male entertainment tradition 75.these works also dramatized his humorously guilty sense of himself as a transgressor of the middle-class values that were his heritage. 76.Twainian humor are evident in the texts assembled in The Bible According to Mark Twain 77. many respects a representative nineteenth-century American, Twain was caught up in the debate about the relationship between science and traditional religion that constitutes the primary context of his biblical inventions 78.Twain was a serious reader of the voluminous scientific literature of his time, looking to the sciences - especially astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology 79.Twain was never able to settle on purely scientific resolutions
 * 80.** Twain would commit himself to neither the scientific nor the religious perspective