Columnist D.J. Tice’s January 13th Minneapolis Star Tribune article in the wake of the media “blizzard of blather” about the publication of a "sanitized" version of Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn makes an excellent point. We shouldn’t get so caught up in the language of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn that we lose sight of the real message of Huck’s story.Tice states that “Huck Finn is about the folly of ever trusting the fashionable morality of one's own time and place. Any time, any place. It's a warning that some of the worst mistakes come when we're absolutely sure about something -- and everyone we know agrees with us.
Huck dramatizes this by violating the slave South's moral order without for one moment realizing that his society's values are corrupt. Huck simply loves Jim, the runaway slave, as an individual, and can't help himself.”
EMC’s Access Edition novels of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer are published in their original “unsanitized” versions, in the vernacular of the time and place. When teaching Twain's work in the secondary classroom it is important to emphasize the context of the language and the true meaning of his message.
You can view samples of EMC’s Access Editions novels at http://www.emcp.com/previews/AccessEditions/
Read Tice’s complete StarTribune column at
http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/113314639.html?elr=KArksUUUoDEy3LGDiO7aiU
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