The English Department is pleased to invite you to a seminar with Ruth Franklin on May 5, 14:00–16:00, in Room 7038, Floor 7, Rabin Building.

My Adventures with Huckleberry Finn: A Journey Through America, Past and Present

For decades, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was considered a foundational work of American literature: a vernacular masterpiece that exposed the hypocrisies of the pre–Civil War South. In recent years, however, its place in the classroom has become increasingly contested, as school districts grapple with its use of racial slurs and its complex portrayal of Jim. Today, the novel occupies a volatile position in American culture, regarded by some as an essential anti-racist text and by others as a work that poses genuine harm to students.

What does it say about America that a single book can be seen as both irreplaceable and irremediable? In this talk, Ruth Franklin reflects on her own “adventures with Huckleberry Finn,” drawing on archival research, classroom visits, interviews with teachers, students, and museum curators, and personal reflections from her travels. Her hybrid approach explores whether it is still possible to read Huck Finn in the current U.S. political climate, and what might be lost if the novel is cast aside.

Ruth Franklin is a literary critic, biographer, and journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Harper’s, among other publications. She is the author of A Thousand Darknesses, a study of Holocaust representation; Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Many Lives of Anne Frank, which examines the life, afterlife, and cultural meaning of Anne Frank and her diary. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, and the National Institute for the Humanities, she is currently at work on a new project about the political controversies surrounding Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

We hope you will join us!

Best,

Department of English Language and Literature

University of Haifa