Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Remembering Mark Twain!

With all the controversy about the new edition of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I can't help but remember another smear on Twain's good name: Adventures of Tom Sawyer NES!

While the new edition of Twain's novel has removed all N-word references and replaced them with "slave" and made other small changes to the text, as a teacher I am worried that Twain's colloquial language may suffer. That's what we've grown to know Twain for - using the dialect of the time period to immerse the reader. That's also why it's sometimes difficult to read.

Of course the NES Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a game that certainly puts me into the adventures Twain intended. I remember playing this game as a kid because I had leafed through Huck Finn and enjoyed Twain's writing. I guess I shouldn't be too upset at moving up streat in a clunky, brown raft dodging aligators.

O, well. I can just see Twain rolling over in his grave!

1 comment:

  1. In school our English teacher made us read Huck Finn. It was actually better then what I expected it to be. A little hard to read but I like how Twain kept the language of back then in his book.

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