![4427591[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/vuIGUzb.jpg "4427591[1].jpg")
Why do people still read this racist trash when it was BTFO by Achebe?
Why do people still read that horribly written high school shit when they've graduated high school?
>>7438915
How the fuck did you misspell 'Reddit' as '4chan'?
>>7438871
>conrad
>racist
>achebe
>not racist
>achebe
>literate
top kek'd senpai
Because Achebe a shit
>>7439002
>entire novella's is based on the conceit that Africa is some savage land
>not racist
Things Fall Apart was hot garbage and only hurt Achebe's point.
>>7439030
>implying Sub-Saharan Africa wasn't savage during the European land grab
You could argue that it's not savage today, or during the glory days of the Muslim or African kingdoms, but in Conrad's time, it was very much the biblical hellscape.
>Chinua Achebe is himself a master of prose, and his novels (e.g. Things Fall Apart) are works of genius. He is also a brilliant reader of Conrad, and his 1977 essay, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness,'” is a compelling and careful examination of the many racist assumptions and implications contained in Heart of Darkness. On every exegetical point which Achebe makes in that essay with regard to racism in Conrad’s novella, I wholeheartedly agree. But on his closing point, that the book should be stricken from every list of great literature and from as many curricula as can do without it, I disagree.
The first of the two reasons that I think Heart of Darkness should continue to be widely read, despite its definite flaws, is for the writing. Achebe, as a novelist operating squarely within the typical bounds of realism, sees no value in vagueness: “In the final consideration [Conrad’s] method amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two antithetical sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy. [. . .] Of course there is a judicious change of adjective from time to time, so that instead of inscrutable, for example, you might have unspeakable, even plain mysterious, etc., etc.” (Achebe 252).
Achebe is correct in identifying the underlying primitivism implied by this imagery, but misses potential benefits of this imagery by saying that even its defenders consider it a stylistic flaw. The achromatic imagery and insistence on inscrutability throughout the novel are part of its value: it is a sustained treatise on hazy perceptions and periods of stasis. This is no lazy deception; this is a frame narrator’s active concealment as expressed through pointillist imagery.
http://thegemsbok.com/art-reviews-and-articles/book-reviews-tuesday-tome-heart-of-darkness-joseph-conrad/
>>7439281
>Chinua Achebe is himself a master of prose, and his novels (e.g. Things Fall Apart) are works of genius.
Why aren't people more timid about calling things genius? It seems like you have to think yourself a bit of a genius to recognize it.
I didn't really notice much racism in it desu, other than the bit where he compared a native to a monkey that had learned to do something
It was mostly about how the jungle was shit
>>7439030
Are you dumb? Conrad was depicting the horrors of colonialism and imperialism, and all Achebe got out of it was "omg he called my continent shit when it was" and cried about it. If anything Conrad was empathetic to the plight of the colonies.
Achebe was the prototypical SJW. Can't believe /lit/ sucks his nigger cock so much.
>>7439351
Pretty sure most high school English classes examine the Conrad/Achebe thing and 50% of /lit/ is just kids regurgitating what they were taught in school
>>7439387
>50% of /lit/ is just kids regurgitating what they were taught in school
I wish my high school english classes had this level of intelligent discussion when I was still in.
>got in trouble for reading heinlein while the class read gatsby
>>7439030
>Implying Africa wasn't shit
If the Belgian Congo in 1890 isn't shit, what is? I'm sorry if someone noticed that England is a nicer place than the fucking Congo. Maybe you can find some white people to pay for your PTSD therapy.
>>7438871
