The book isChinua Achebe's novel,Things Fall Apart
each journal will be divided into two parts: reader response and literary investigation. Your journal entries should represent your own original thinking without consulting outside sources.Usually, journals will be due by Thursday morning, but this first week of the semester, I will extend the deadline until Sunday night to accomodate any students who add the course midweek.
Reader Response (200-300 words):
This week, please preview the first half of the book and make some hypotheses and predictions. Avoid summarizing everything that you read and try to focus instead on these reading questions: Who do you think will be the most important characters and why? How are you initially making sense of what is happening in this village? What are your initial impressions of some of the characters? What do you think is going to fall apart and why?
Literary Investigation (200-300 words):
This week we will focus on methods of characterization. Direct characterization is anytime an author directly tells you what a character is like. Please find an example of direct characterization of a major character in Achebe's novel. Indirect characterization is much more interesting. This is when an author shows you what a character is like through any of the following methods:
- How the character speaks and what he/she says
- What the character does
- What the character thinks and feels
- How the character behaves and interacts with other characters
- What other characters say and think about the character
Please provide examples of Achebe's use of indirect characterization of a major character from the novel and discuss how this information provides a richer sense of the character.
Citation reminder:
You are not required to make a Works Cited page for your journal entries and discussions. For future reference, the citation of Achebe's novel follows the
MLA formula for a book by one author(Links to an external site.)
. This is how the edition I'm reading is cited:
Achebe, Chinua.Things Fall Apart. Doubleday, 1959.
You are required to use proper in-text citations for your journal entries, discussions (and essays of course). The rule is to include the author's last name and the page number in your parentheses the first time you quote or paraphrase or cite a specific example. Any time after that in the same entry, you can just use the page number. Here is what that might look like:
The author writes, "The year that Okonkwo took eight hundred seed-yams from Kwakibie was the worst year in living memory" (Achebe 23). Examples of the horrible conditions include an extended scorching drought followed by floods (23-24).
Please notice that the end punctuation is withheld until after the final parentheses in MLA Style and that there are no abbreviations or punctuation marks within the parentheses.