Light Out, Huck, They Still Want to Sivilize You

Classic literature is today censored in the name of political correctness. The power of words wins over freedom of speech and the dread of treading on somebody’s foot is bigger than ever before. Michiko Kakutani is in her article “Light Out, Huck, They Still Want to Sivilize You” from The New York Times arguing against the rounds of literary sanitation.

Kakutani uses the much-discussed word “nigga” several times in her article. The fact that a word can be so banned that people would not even say it at loud – not even in the debate about the significance meaning of the exact word – is on the one hand “giving the word more power than it deserves”, which is mentioned in the CBS News clip “Huckleberry Finn and the N-word debate”. On the other hand is the possibility of hurting other people of great important – but when it comes to having a “teachable movement”, which the author and teacher David Bradly describes in the CBS News clip, it can be important to get the problem on the table instead of mystifying the word.
The originality of classic literature is under threat of the need to make everything inoffensive. This need is probably created by good intentions, but is at the same time leaning against an extreme controlling society. Like Salman Rushdie points out in his article “On Censorship” from The New Yorker; “Great art, or, let’s just say, more modestly, original art is never created in the safe middle ground, but always at the edge.”
Is it not the purpose of classic literature, and art in general, to touch the reader at some point? By censoring the great works the essential meaning of writing becomes affected.

Kakutani is a big critic to censor and convinces her audiences by her pathos-marked language and arguments, where she builds op a sense of solidarity and frightens her readers her exaggerated examples. But does she not have a point? By censoring classic literature the reader is being placed as a naive person unable to think critically and place the work in the context. The issue of censorship of classic literature is essential – how do we create anything important if the way an audient feels becomes the important part of the art?