Home And Exile Chinua Achebe Pdf To Doc

This trenchant and illuminating book by one of Africa's most influential and celebrated writers is a major statement on the importance and dangers of stories, one in which Achebe makes telling use of his personal experiences to examine the political nature of culture and specifically literature.It is the weaving of the personal into the bigger picture that makes Home and Exile so remarkable and affecting. It's the closest we are likely to get by way of Achebe's autobiography but it is also a brilliantly argued critique of imperialism. Achebe challenges the way the West has appropriated Africa with a particular emphasis on how 'imperialist' literature has been used to justify its dispossession and degradation.Above all this is a book that articulates persuasively why literature matters.

Stories are a real source of power in the world, Achebe concludes, and to imitate the literature of another culture is to give that power away. Chinua Achebe was born in Nigeria in 1930, and in a long and distinguished career has published novels, stories, essays and poems.Cited in the Sunday Times as one of the '1,000 Makers of the Twentieth Century' for defining 'a modern African literature that was truly African' and thereby making 'a major contribution to world literature'. Achebe has received more than 30 honorary doctorates from universities around the world.

Home and Exile by Chinua Achebe in DJVU, EPUB, FB2 download e-book. Welcome to our site, dear reader! All content included on our site, such as text, images, digital. I first encountered the venerable Chinua Achebe on the pages of his oft-neglected little. Ture in this revealing excerpt from Home and Exile (2000: 51).

In 2007 he was awarded the Man Booker International Prize. He lives with his wife in Annandale-on-Hudson, where they teach at Bard College.

They have four children.

Chinua Achebe's emergence as 'the founding father of African literature. In the English language,' in the words of the Harvard University philosopher K. Anthony Appiah, could very well be traced to his encounter in the early fifties with Joyce Cary's novel Mister Johnson, set in Achebe's native Nigeria. Achebe read it while studying at the University College in Idaban during the last years of British colonial rule, and in a curriculum full of Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, Mister Johnson stood out as one of the few books about Africa. Time magazine had recently declared Mister Johnson the 'best book ever written about Africa,' but Achebe and his classmates had quite a different reaction.

The students saw the Nigerian hero as an 'embarrassing nitwit,' as Achebe writes in his new book, and detected in the Irish author's descriptions of Nigerians 'an undertow of uncharitableness. A contagion of distaste, hatred, and mockery.' Mister Johnson, Achebe writes, 'open[ed] my eyes to the fact that my home was under attack and that my home was not merely a house or a town but, more importantly, an awakening story.' Home and Exile, which grew out of three lectures Achebe gave at Harvard in 1998, describes this transition to a new era in literature. The book is both a kind of autobiography and a rumination on the power stories have to create a sense of dispossession or to confer strength, depending on who is wielding the pen. Achebe depicts his gradual realization that Mister Johnson was just one in a long line of books written by Westerners that presented Africans to the world in a way that Africans didn't agree with or recognize, and he examines the 'process of 're-storying' peoples who had been knocked silent by all kinds of dispossession.' He ends with a hope for the twenty-first century—that this 're-storying' will continue and will eventually result in a 'balance of stories among the world's peoples.'