scholarly journals Re-Reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Postcolonial Perspective

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.K.M. Aminur Rashid
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Chinua Achebe ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Igbo People ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
The Individual ◽  
To Receive

Being a postcolonial narrative, Things Fall Apart experiences a wide critical acclaim. From the pen of Chinua Achebe, the Igbo cultural complexity has come into being a theme that opens up a historical account of the clash of two cultures. Okonkwo, a very well-known public figure in his community falls under the threat of a new culture brought by the white missionaries preaching the gospels of the Christianity. After the arrival of the Christian culture, the first collision that takes place is the division at the individual, and then at the societal levels. When a number of the Igbo people, including Okonkwo’s son, change their religion, it creates chaos and confusions throughout the community. Although the Igbo people have a well-established way of life, the Europeans do not understand. That is why they show no respect to the cultural practices of the Igbo people. What Achebe delivers in the novel is that Africans are not savages and their societies are not mindless. The things fall apart because Okonkwo fails at the end to take his people back to the culture they all shared once. The sentiments the whites show to the blacks regarding the Christianity clearly recap the slave treatment the blacks were used to receive from the whites in the past. Achebe shows that the picture of the Africans portrayed in literature and histories are not real, but the picture was seen through the eyes of the Europeans. Consequently, Okonkwo hangs himself when he finds his established rules and orders are completely exiled by his own people and when he sees Igbo looses its honor by falling apart.

scholarly journals "Let Fair Weather Bring Me Home: A Maltese Story" // "Deja que el buen tiempo me traiga a casa: una historia de Malta"

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-243
Author(s):  
Oliver Friggieri
Keyword(s):  
Personal Relationship ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Southern Europe ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Fair Weather ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Descriptive Element

Let Fair Weather Bring Me Home: A Maltese Story (Excerpt from unpublished novel)Life in itself largely depends on one’s personal relationship with nature. Humankind develops as it discovers new modes of relating more efficiently with whatever surrounds it. Thus both the individual and the social aspects of such a condition greatly  depend on each other. Let Fair Weather Bring Me Home is a Maltese novel which strives to portray such a bond in terms of what it entails to live in a traditional village far removed from the center of the country where nature had to succumb to a great extent to the dictates of culture, and mainly to technology. The descriptive element of the novel, as evinced in this excerpt, is meant not only to construct a context within which the villagers live, but also to suggest a sharp contrast with the modern city, impersonal, overcrowded, noisy and inevitably distant from spaces which are considered to be still undeveloped, namely still left in their primeval state. The depiction of such a way of life in such a village, inspired by an environment typical of Southern Europe, may seem to be simply an evocation of the past, as it originally is, but it also recognizes the fact that such a relationship with nature still survives in various parts of various countries. The essential message of the excerpt is that modern ecological considerations are necessarily the expression of  humanity’s need to rediscover nature and to return to where it once belonged.                   

Nation and Generation in A Tale of Two Cities

PMLA ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 448-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert D. Hutter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Generational Conflict ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Critical Model ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Critical Methods ◽  
The French Revolution

A Tale of Two Cities, the French Revolution becomes a metaphor for the conflicts between generations and between classes that preoccupied Dickens throughout his career. Dickens uses a double plot and divided characters to express these conflicts; his exaggerated use of “splitting”—which the essay defines psychoanalytically—sometimes makes A Tale of Two Cities‘ language and structure appear strained and humorless. We need to locate A Tale of Two Cities within a framework of nineteenth-century attitudes toward revolution and generational conflict by using a combination of critical methods—literary, historical, psychoanalytic. This essay relates the reader's experience to the structure of the text; and it derives from Dickens’ language, characterization, and construction a critical model that describes the individual reader's experience while explaining some of the contradictory assessments of the novel over the past hundred years.

scholarly journals A Study on the Structural Reform of the Korean Public Prosecutor's Office with a view to Lifting International Competitiveness

1998 ◽  
Vol 13 (0) ◽  
pp. 173-186
Author(s):  
Jeong Ho Lee
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Korean War ◽  
International Competition ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
New Era ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Economic ◽  
The Republic ◽  
To Receive

Although the Republic of Korea has recovered from the ruins of the 1950's Korean War and achieved a remarkable economic growth during the past 40 years, it is now, at the threshold of 21st century, faced with the great national economic crises which led us to receive the IMF's rescue fund. To make a long story short, I presume the cause of the economic tragedy mainly originated from the fact that the frame and habitude of our way of life were not so changed suitably as to accommodate the new era of unbounded international competition.

scholarly journals Cultural Diversity in Igbo Life: A Postcolonial Response to Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (23) ◽  
pp. 69-89
Author(s):  
Sazzad Hossain Zahid
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Cohesive Force ◽  
Chinua Achebe ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Genocide ◽  
Igbo People ◽  
Western Imperialism ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Indigenous Society

In his book Chinua Achebe, David Caroll (1980) describes the novel Arrow of God as a fight for dominance both on the theological and political level, as well as in the framework of Igbo philosophy. In Critical Perspectives on Chinua Achebe (1990), famous Achebe critics C. L. Innes and Berth Lindforts consider Arrow of God as a novel with conflicting ideas and voices inside each community with the tensions and rivalries that make it alive and vital. Another profound scholar on Achebe Chinwe Christiana Okechukwu (2001) in Achebe the Orator: The Art of Persuasion in Chinua Achebe's Novels assesses Arrow of God, which depicts a community under imminent danger of cultural genocide unleashed by agents of Western imperialism who have recently arrived in the indigenous society. However, the author in this study attempts to see Arrow of God as a postcolonial response to cultural diversity that upholds its uniting and cohesive force in Nigerian Igbo life. The goal is to look at how Achebe, in response to misleading western discourses, develops a simplistic image and appreciation that persists in Igbo life and culture even as colonization takes hold. This paper also exhibits how the Igbo people share their hardships, uphold their age-old ideals, celebrate festivals, and even battle on disagreements. This study employs postcolonial theory to reconsider aspects of cultural diversity among the African Igbo people, which are threatened by the intervention of European colonialism in the name of religion, progress, and civilization.

scholarly journals Rhizomatic Cities in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-194
Author(s):  
Sambit Panigrahi
Keyword(s):  
Structural Stability ◽  
Coherent Structure ◽  
Structural Modeling ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Structural Coherence ◽  
Critical Responses ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
The Individual

Italo Calvino’s highly successful novel Invisible Cities thoroughly explains Deleuze and Guattari’s famous postmodern concept of rhizome. The cities in the novel do not possess a fixed and coherent structure; rather they exude a structurality that is immensely fleeting and continually evolving. Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities which ironically precedes Deleuze and Guattari’s book A Thousand Plateaus clearly demonstrates the defining characteristic features of rhizome through the unusual and seemingly incomprehensible structure of the individual cities. There have been scanty critical responses in the past regarding the rhizomatic behavior of Calvino’s cities, despite an extraordinary abundance of critical works existing on Calvino’s writing. The rhizomatic patterns of Calvino’s cities, it is believed by the author, need further critical attention. Rhizome, through its perpetually unstable structural modeling, perhaps most effectively demonstrates our utterly disarrayed postmodern condition of existence where any desired structural stability and coherence is a virtual impossibility, and of this trait, Calvino’s cities in the said novel are the principal demonstrators. Based on these precepts, this article intends to analyze how Calvino’s cities in the novel, with their perpetual and immense structural variabilities, exude before the readers a typical postmodern world that wholesomely discards the very idea of structural coherence and stability.  

scholarly journals Lexical Gaps and Ideological Shift in the Translation of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as “Le Monde S’effondrein French”

2020 ◽  
pp. 283-297
Author(s):  
Angelinus Kwame Negedu
Keyword(s):  
French Language ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Chinua Achebe ◽  
The Novel ◽  
English Reader ◽  
Original Title ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
Ideological Divergence

In translating Chinua Achebe‟s Things Fall Apart, Michel Ligny translates directly Igbo terminologies, realities and beliefs into the French language. This has contributed greatly in the preservation of the beauty and authenticity of the original text. However, the title of the novel is domesticated by Michel Ligny to present a different ideology. Within the framework of Lawrence Venuti (2004) theory of domestication and foreignization of translation, this paper examines the ideological divergence between the title of the original text and the title of the translation. The paper concludes that the ideology that the translated title projects to the French-reader is totally different from the ideology that the original title projects to the English-reader.

scholarly journals Okonkwo’s Fall: Multiple Perspectives

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 151
Author(s):  
T S Varadharajan ◽  
Dr. K. Ramesh
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Chinua Achebe ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
Igbo Culture ◽  
Things Fall Apart

<p><em>This article aims at exploring the causes of the fall of Okonkwo, the protagonist of the Nigerian Novel</em><em>.</em><em> Things Fall </em><em>A</em><em>part by the renowned novelist, Chinua Achebe. Though the novel mainly deals with the fall of Igbo Culture where Okonkwo has played the sheet anchor role in the novel, Things Fall Apart at the hands of British establishment in Nigeria, the other vital reasons that make him vulnerable will also be discussed at length in this article. It is from the study of the novel, it is established that the Igbo society that refuses to change itself could be one of the reasons for the fall. However, it is very clear that the changes should take place spontaneously and not by force which the Igbo society has been the victim and the representative, Okonkwo its scapegoat. The writers of the article make sure that the reading of this article will be an eye opener in terms of Nigerian consciousness as revealed in the novel, Things Fall Apart. </em></p>

CONTEMPORARY LEBANESE FICTION: MODERNIZATION WITHOUT MODERNITY

2006 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 561-580
Author(s):  
Samira Aghacy
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Representative Work ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Self ◽  
The Impact

This study focuses on the nature of the Lebanese encounter with modernity in Lebanese fiction over the past forty years or so, a time of great ideological, political, and cultural upheavals. The first part traces the effect of modernity on works by Lebanese writers since the 1950s, a period of “revolutionary political and social change,” and of learning and cultural and social ferment. The second part of the study focuses on Rashid al-Daif's novel עAzizi al-Sayyed Kawabata. My choice of this particular novel is related to the fact that it is a representative work that underlines the impact of modernity on Lebanese individuals and society during and in the wake of the civil war. The novel raises questions about rationality, ideology, the individual self, and the relevance of these Western constructs to the local situation in Lebanon. The structure of the novel itself and the use of the epistolary and autobiographical modes of writing underscore the novel's obsession with modernity. Within this context, one could say that al-Daif's novel can be viewed as a complex work of fiction that encompasses different forms of modernity, the tensions between these modernities, and between modernity and authenticity.

Social being and cultural practices

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Ray ◽  
Julian Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
North Park ◽  
Material Things ◽  
Current Practices

Human societies are held together by relationships, conventions, traditions, institutions, and tacit understandings. These things are intangible, and while humans themselves are reproduced as corporeal beings, their societies are sustained by practical activities that continually recreate knowledge, customs, and interpersonal bonds. Just as a language would ultimately disappear if it ceased to be used as a means of communication, so the rules and routines of social life are maintained only if they are practised. The corollary of this is that societies are not fixed and bounded entities as much as arrangements that are continually coming into existence, works (if you like) that are never completed. But material things are also in flux, constantly ripening, maturing, being made, being used consecutively in different ways through their ‘lifespans’, eroding and decaying: so that the social and substantial worlds are as one in being in an unending state of becoming. Nonetheless, objects often have the capacity to endure longer than habits, rules, or affiliations. They continue to exist independently of human beings and their actions. As a result, old artefacts and places occupied in the past can serve to give structure to current practices and transactions, providing cues and prompts, or reminding us of past events and appropriate modes of conduct. Hunter-gatherers have generally lived a way of life that involves making continual reference to natural features and landmarks. Certain distinctive cliffs, hills, islands, trees, and lakes have represented places to return to, or at which to arrange meetings or encounter game. As such they will have been places of periodic resort, and were incorporated into collective history and mythology. Meanwhile, other places acquired a meaning simply because specific people camped there, or met there, or died there. During the Mesolithic in Britain, some locations seem to have been persistently returned to over very long periods of time. One example is the site at North Park Farm, Bletchingley in Surrey, which appears to have been visited sporadically over hundreds of years, although the structural evidence for this at the site was sparse, being limited to a group of fireplaces.

scholarly journals THE IMPACT OF THE 19TH CENTURY EUROPEAN COLONIALISM IN AFRICA, IN THE NOVEL “THINGS FALL APART” BY CHINUA ACHEBE

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 109
Author(s):  
Afriliyani Piola ◽  
Happy Anastasia Usman
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Chinua Achebe ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Impact

Things Fall Apart is a novel potrays the background of traditional life and primitive culture Ibo tribe in Umuofia, Nigeria, Africa and also the impact of European colonialism towards Africans’ society in the early 19th century. The research applies the qualitative method and it supported by the sociology of literature approach. The primary data are taken from the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Based on the analysis the researcher conducts, the impact of European colonialism in Africa which not only brings a positive impacts but also negative legacy. There are several points of the impact European colonialism in Africa : existence of christianity, existence of language, establishment regulation and contribution to development.

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