and your wonderful natural rights book and of course you spend a great amount of time discussing huck finnthe famous relationship between huck and jan and you talk about how he has to turn to society to free his friend jim. you know him, the great scholar of the american peer is in. i reckon i have a light out for the territory. she is going to adopt me and civilize me. i can't stand it, i have been there before. what is the significance of that line and huck finn? telling us about the american idea. prof. zuckert: when i was listening to allison bernadette i thought about going in a different direction. the significance of sliding out of the territory is the american tradition of beginning anew. that is connected with the original settlers. this is, i think, material that is examined and re-examined from the beginning of what would be a distinctively american literature. i would begin with cooper's pioneers. which is about the man who does not want to respect the law. he does not want to have regulations as to whether he could have the gun, he will slip according to the laws of nature. an

looking out well beyond the picture plane her cotton is in a sex long over her shoulder almost like huck finn getting ready to take off for the high territory and what you have is a break in the cotton plants. all she has to do is take one more step and she's in our space. there's one cotton plant. that's kind of trying to hold her back, but i don't give it much of a chance. and i think homer doesn't either and to me the message is the answer isn't going to be the same for everybody. some people will thrive and succeed and move forward and others are simply not going to be able to overcome what has happened to them and i think that homer's ability to create something that universal and that powerful out of something so specific is his real gift and this is where landscape and genre painting effectively come together. the idea is sometimes the landscape is now the obstacle you have to overcome in order to succeed not the path into an unclouded future. i want to end with the landscape because that's ultimately where we begin in the book. you will find that it's the first chapter that tackles la