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Jul. 21st, 2024|01:14 pm |
"We might consider the belief of the Kentucky poet and farmer Wendell Berry that the tragedy of literary education today is that “teachers and students read the great songs and stories to learn about them, not learn from them.” We talk and write about literature “as if we do not care, as if it does not matter, whether or not it is true.”
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One way is to test literature against our own personal standards, while Berry wants us to test ourselves against the standards of great literature.
The now-famous first novel of the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958), is regularly cited as a great protest against colonialism and cultural imperialism. It is indeed that, and yet it is at the same time a profound critique of the features of Achebe’s own Ibo culture which made that culture both ripe for conquest and susceptible to the arguments of Christian missionaries. Achebe says quite openly that one of the reasons Christianity succeeded among many of his people (including his own father) is that it called attention to the fundamental injustice of some Ibo traditions: for instance, excluding some people from the community as osu (ritually unclean outcastes), or leaving twins to die in the forest because they were thought to be evil.
/Alan Jacobs, To read and to live |
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