While Girls at War and The Madman take place on the other side of the planet, Chinua Achebe's essay An Image of Africa is specifically directed at Americans in the academic world. I've never read Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness but if it's ever assigned to me I will know what to expect. Reading An Image of Africa was a less conflicting experience for me than reading The Stranglehold of English Lit. because I haven't read the novel that Achebe finds so repulsive. It's much easier for me to agree with an author that a book I haven't enjoyed is evil.
From Girls at War I learned more about the horrors of war. I've heard about how terrible being a soldier on the front lines of a battle is, but this story helped me to see how difficult things are for the "civilians". It's horrible how desperate Gladys is; she has to be willing to do anything to survive.
All of Achebe's works that we read this week contained elements of fighting against oppression which is something that is very important to me (and to the vast majority of human beings on planet earth, I expect.) I think it is Achebe's excellent writing on this topic that grabs my emotional and mental attention.
It's obvious from Achebe's masterful lecture-turned-essay that he is a very intelligent man and well versed in the world of academia. As a student that's not enough to make me enjoy his work, but it makes me consider to recommending him to my father who is an academic and a reader. I really enjoyed reading both of Achebe's short stories even though they were written with the purpose of communicating to his readers bad things about colonialism, not to entertain. It's quite tricky to write an enjoyable story on unpleasant topics, and I think this shows that Achebe is an excellent writer.
I like the reference to Things Fall Apart in your title: that's funny. In your analysis, I think you can take the development of your ideas a little deeper by using the word "because" more often. For example, for each of the last sentences of each paragraph, if you stuck "because" on that sentence and continued it to it's causal conclusion, you would automatically deepen the analysis.
ReplyDeleteAlso, part of a Reader Response is demonstrating how personal experience informs analysis. See if you can do a little more explanation of how you come to your analysis based on your personal experience.