Chinua Achebe’s Dynamic World in Things Fall Apart

Authors

  • Yao Jung Lin Ph.D, Graduate Institute of Education, National Changhua University of Education

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17722/jell.v2i2.33

Keywords:

Achebe, Bakhtin, social heteroglossia

Abstract

The society of Umuofia in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart can be seen as a dynamic world based upon Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s theory of social heteroglossia. The opposing social worldviews reflected in these languages or speech, in Bakhtin’s words, can be referred to as two contrasting forces, the centripetal forces and the centrifugal forces. In Things Fall Apart, the centripetal forces are represented through the unified centralized rigid social ideologies while the centrifugal forces are revealed through the disunified decentralized flexible social ideologies in the speech of characters. The society of Umuofia is an active dynamic one within which the diverse social ideologies or forces interact and contest.

Author Biography

Yao Jung Lin, Ph.D, Graduate Institute of Education, National Changhua University of Education

Y. J. Lin has been interested in and persistently conducted the postcolonial studies on literature and education after he got the master’s degree of literature and doctoral degree of education.

References

Achebe, Chinua. “Misunderstanding.” Beware Soul Brother and Other Poems. London: Heinemann, 1972.

Achebe, Chinua. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Doubleday, 1989.

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor Books, 1994.

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Gardiner, Michael. The Dialogic of Critique: M. M. Bakhtin and the Thoery of Ideology. London: Routledge, 1992.

Lindfors, Bernth, et al. “Interview with Chinua Achebe.” Conversations with Chinua Achebe. Ed. Bernth Lindfors. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997.

Medvedev, P. N. and M. M. Bakhtin. The Formal method in Literary Scholarship. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.

Morris, Pam. The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writing of Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov. Ed. Pam Morris. London: Edward Arnold Ltd, 1994.

Morson, Gary Saul and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

Ogbaa, Kalu. Understanding Things Fall Apart: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Westport: The Greenwood Press, 1999.

Osei-Nyame, Kwadwo. “Chinua Achebe Writing Culture: Representations of Gender and Tradition in Things Fall Apart.” Research in African Literatures 30.2 (Summer 1999).

Thomson, Clive. “Bakhtin’s Theory of Genry.” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 9 (1984).

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Published

2014-10-30

How to Cite

Lin, Y. J. (2014) “Chinua Achebe’s Dynamic World in Things Fall Apart”, Journal of English Language and Literature (ISSN: 2368-2132), 2(2), pp. 171–178. doi: 10.17722/jell.v2i2.33.

Issue

Vol. 2 No. 2 (2014): Journal of English Language and Literature

Section

Articles

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