Chinua Achebe%2C 1966.
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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) July 25, 2024: Over my entire teaching career, from September 1969 to the end of May 2009, I frequently taught the Igbo-and-English-speaking Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe's novels Things Fall Apart (1958) and No Longer at Ease (1960) - more frequently than I taught any other works of imaginative literature.
For example, I required the students in my reading-intensive introductory-level survey course Literacy, Technology, and Society at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) to read both of those Achebe novels. The two novels are related to one another in the sense that the main character in Things Fall Apart is the grandfather of the main character in No Longer at Ease.
Now, Things Fall Apart centers on the encounter of the Nigerian people in a remote village with the British Empire around the turn of the twentieth century (circa 1905). But the story in No Longer at Ease centers around the mid-century (circa 1960) educated urban Nigerians who are awaiting Nigeria's freedom from the British Empire.
The Wikipedia entry on Things Fall Apart reports that "it has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide." It also says that it "has been translated into more than 50 languages."
Wow! I find these numbers impressive!
Now, for further information about my course Literacy, Technology, and Society, see my UMD homepage www.d.umn.edu/~tfarrell (click on the prompt for courses and then select the course numbered 1506 from the drop-down menu).
Now, over the years of my adult life (I turned 80 on my last birthday), I have devoted an enormous amount of time and energy to writing about my former teacher at Saint Louis University, the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955).
See, for example, my OEN articles (1) "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020); and (2) "Thomas J. Farrell on Thomas J. Farrell" (dated November 17, 2023):
Now, I want to re-frame what I just said about Things Fall Apart in terms of Ong's media-ecology account of our Western cultural history.
On the one hand, the British Empire circa 1905 represents the print culture that emerged in our Western cultural history after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s.
On the other hand, the remote Nigerian village that Achebe portrays in Things Fall Apart represents a residual form of what Ong refers to as a primary oral culture.
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