"A man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself." (Things Fall Apart )I'm happy to introduce you to Chinua Achebe, if you haven't already had the pleasure of reading one of his works. I admit to having come to him late. I only read his novel Things Fall Apart because it was on the graduate reading and a professor suggested it. Ever since, I've been hooked. We're reading his TFA as the first work in our exploration of colonial and postcolonial literature. If those distinctions don't make a whole lot of sense yet, they soon will. We'll be reading a little bit of Conrad as well, i.e. Heart of Darkness, we'll try to understand the two as two approaches to the same problem. I think From Achebe's perspective, Conrad fails to represent African culture and society with any subtlety. Conrad's proponents would argue that he did a lot to expose the tyranny and brutality of colonial expansion. We'll have fun figuring out what we think about it.
You'll find a nice selection of scholarly articles on the subject of postcolonial literature in the Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Browse the table of contents to find something that interests you. I recommend "Post Colonial Literature and the Western Literary Canon" as an introduction to the discussion.
The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad is a great source of articles as well. I could recommend "Conrad and Imperialism" and "Heart of Darkness."
If you're on campus or have logged in through our proxy server, you can visit Oxford Reference Online for a summary article describing postcolonial literature.Please make sure to check out the discussion questions as Turnitin.com. You'll have to log in at Turnitin and then enroll in the course.
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Chinua Achebe Lecture at UPenn Chinua Achebe Q/A Chapter 17 (Recording .m4a or .mp3) (.pdf Text)
Chapter 21 (Recording .m4a or .mp3) (.pdf Text)
My mom died in November 2004 after a long battle with inflammatory breast cancer. I've been reluctant to post anything about it here, but I think it's probably ok. I miss you mom.
