It is a research essay for the book- Achebe,
Chinua (Nigeria): Things Fall Apart.
It needs to be 2800-3000 words, MLA, and it cant be in first or second person.
It has to have 6-8 secondary sources, along with the book as a separate source, and at-least 1 in text citation from each source used.
Also for the sources its required that 4 of those be peer reviewed sources from a database that can only be accessed by students
But since all that is needed is one in text citation from each of those sources i figured id find some quotes from 4 articles that can be used and put them here, and maybe you could fit them in, but If you would like me too, i could also try and screen shot the articles and send them to you if it doesnt work.
Since only the 4 sources i provided need to be peer reviewed from the database, then the last 2-4 sources can be from anywhere, as long as its credible.
I put the citation for the articles before the quotes
(Source 1)
Borman, David A. “Playful Ethnography: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and
Nigerian Education.” Ariel, vol. 46, no. 3, Johns Hopkins University Press,
2015, pp. 91–112, https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2015.0024
(These are on page 91)
The June 20, 1958 edition of the Times Literary Supplement
contains one short review of Chinua Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall
Apart, recently published with a print run of two thousand hardcover copies
by Heinemann’s educational department. The reviewer, Philip Rawson,
immediately notes the novel’s authenticity, for in the second sentence,
he credits Achebe’s ability to ” [draw] a fascinating picture of
tribal life among his own people at the end of the nineteenth century”
(341). Rawson’s assessment is by no means exceptional, as the book was
praised by The Listener for its “clear and meaty style free of the
dandyism often affected by Negro authors” (qtd. in Ezenwa-Ohaeto 66),
while The New York Times noted that the novel “takes its place with that
small company of sensitive books that describe primitive society from the
inside” (Rodman 28).
A major portion of the British colonial project in Africa was the
instillation of a British educational system: courses, pedagogy, exams, and
classroom materials were all modeled on those in Britain, with textbooks
often coming directly from British publishing houses. S. I. A. Kotei comments
that colonial Africa and Europe had “identical structures” in terms
of “educational systems; hence the former’s dependence on the
latter for educational material” (The Book 87). Before World War I, the
education system in Africa was mostly run by missionaries, and the
educational material reflected their religious efforts. However, between the
wars, the British Empire began to take more control in African education,
eventually calling for “more uniformity in education policy” and
“a bolder role for government” in the daily activities of colonial
schooling (Windel 8).
(Source 2)
Mengara, Daniel M. “Colonial Intrusion and Stages of Colonialism in Chinua
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.” African Studies Review, vol. 62, no. 4, Cambridge
University Press, 2019, pp. 31–56.
(This one is on p.g 31)
Chinua Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart, has continued to offer—perhaps much more than his third novel, Arrow of God—the most vivid account of the process of early colonial penetration in Africa.
(p.g 31)
To be clear, this analysis does not purport to use Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
as a conduit to an “authentic history” of sub-Saharan Africa. Rather,
it seeks to extract from Achebe’s fictional universe some of the
underlying principles of colonialism that help the reader to understand
it, not as a series of specific historical events, spaces, and places,
but rather as a process or a series of psycho–historical processes. These processes contain a number of inescapable features that enabled colonialism to become an effective tool of and for sustained political, cultural, and economic domination in sub-Saharan Africa.
(Source 3)
Morrison, Jago. “Tradition and Modernity in Chinua Achebe’s African Trilogy.”
Research in African Literatures, vol. 49, no. 4, Indiana University Press, 2018,
pp. 14–26, https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.49.4.03.
(p.g 14)
As Simon Gikandi argues, however, what this account of Achebe tended to
miss was the ways in which his project was always, at the same time,
entirely concerned with the idea of an Africa emerging into modernity.
Among African writers in the late colonial period, the core aim was to
“produce a literary tradition that would herald the coming into being of
a decolonized polity, one in which the failed modernity of colonialism would be chaperoned by Africans into a new political kingdom” (Gikandi 7).
(p.g 14)
Throughout these works, the problem that occupies Achebe most urgently
is that of leadership in changing times. In precolonial culture, the
figure of the elder exemplified a model of authority as selfless
service, regulating and moderating destabilizing elements. The trilogy
shows the systematic erosion of that function and the ascendancy of the
colonial bureaucrat, for whom a parallel ideal of disinterestedness
merges with a pitiless and dehumanizing gaze.
(Source 4)
Emeka Chukwumezie, Thomas-Michael, et al. “Folkloric Meta-Narratives In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature,
vol. 8, no. 2, Australian International Academic Centre PTY. Ltd
(AIAC), 2019, p. 102–, https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.8n.2p.102.
(p.g 102)
Following Chinua Achebe’s claim that his Things Fall Apart is a counter-narrative to Joyce
Cary’s distortion of the African image in Cary’s Mister Johnson , most critics of Things Fall
Apart have approached the existence of folklore in the novel from the perspective of cultural
affirmation. Others see it as part of the artistic ornament used to deck the work. Be that as it may,
this paper does not intend to dispute these perspectives. It rather intends to prove that Achebe’s
use of folklore in Things Fall Apart is not just to affirm the functionality of folk culture in the
precolonial African society depicted in this novel but also to buttress several sequence of events
of the novel. It argues that the folkloric narratives within the larger narrative that is Things Fall
Apart function as specialized meta-narratives which play an interesting array of roles in the
novel, namely: to run commentaries on the incidents that surround the hero’s life; to show how
folkloric wisdom in the novel appears to warn against certain unethical actions of the hero and
to comment on the significance of some executed actions in the novel; as well as to foreshadow
impending tragic situations in the life of the hero just like the chorus in Greek tragic plays. The
methodology for this study is a critical analysis of the text in the light of a recontextualised and
re-imagined application of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s concept of metanarrative. Unlike Lyotard’s
notion of a metanarrative as a grand narrative that helps to legitimize other little narratives, we
elect to read folkloric meta-narratives as related miniature versions of different sequences of the
story of the novel, Things Fall Apart
(p.g 102)
The undermining of the centrality of folklore in the critical
valuation of Things Fall Apart by critics is evidently inher-
ited from the author’s comment on the novel. Achebe in his
Hopes and Impediments insists that he ‘would be quite sat –
isfied if [his] novels did no more than teach [the] readers
that their past –with all its imperfections –[is] not one long
night of savagery from which the first European acting on
God’s behalf delivered them’ (45). This attempt to bring the
Africans into awareness of the baneful effects of colonial –
ism leads to a predetermined critical perspective to the nov-
el mainly tilted towards culture and identity
