Course: African Literature
Instructor: Jacqueline Goffe-McNish
Time: Tuesday
Room: Zoom
Phone #: 845-471-7220
Email: mcnish.emeriti@sunydutchess.edu
Book: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Guidelines 1. Please focus your discussions on the text being discussed.
The Second Coming
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Schedule
September 19 Introduction of Class Members
Introduction to African Literature
A close reading of pages 3 and 4
Discussion of Poem
September 26 Chapters 1-4
Cultural Analysis and Setting Analysis
Coming of Ikemefuna
Role of the Agbala and the Week of Peace
Feminist and Womanist Analysis
October 3 Chapters 5-9
Character Analysis Primitivism
Presentation of Death
The Festival
The “Christ” Figure and The Role of Religion
October 10 Chapters 10-13
The African Diaspora, Middle Passage Experience
Masking, Veiling, and Double Consciousness
Music as the voice of the people
Relationships and Celebration
October 17 Chapters 14-16
Anancism
Mother is Supreme
The Exile
Oberika’s Visit
October 24 Chapters 17-20
Magical Realism and Epiphany
Presentation of Journeys
Coming of the Missionaries
Colonization
October 31 Chapters 21-25
Creolization
The Return to Umuofia
“Thing Fall Apart” The New Order
The Commissioner
November 7 Discussion and Processing
The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger
Postcoloniality
Suicide or Revolt
Journal
Issues in the Texts:
- Biblical Allusions
- Search for El Dorado
- Magical Realism (3)
- Epiphany
- Symbolic geography
- Presentation of death (3)
- Postcolonialism
- Creolization
- Masking
- Veiling
- Double Consciousness
- Submersion
- Surrealism
- Role of Religion
- Role of Culture
- Deconstruction
- Womanist Analysis
- Role of Rum
- Role of Supernatural
- Nature and Human Condition
- Signifying
- Role of Africa
- African Diaspora
- Middle Passage
- Silhouetting
- Role of Language- Proverbs Storytelling and Pidgin
- Naming
- Music as the voice of the people
- Feminist Analysis
- Journeys
- Sisyphean Experience
- Biblical Allusions