# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Jonathan Demme interview on "Beloved" (1998)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
ReadWriteThink couldn't publish all of this great content without literacy experts to write and review for us. If you've got lessons plans, videos, activities, or other ideas you'd like to contribute, we'd love to hear from you.

Find the latest in professional publications, learn new techniques and strategies, and find out how you can connect with other literacy professionals.

Teacher Resources by Grade

Your students can save their work with Student Interactives.

More

Home › Classroom Resources › Lesson Plans

Lesson Plan

Grades

11 - 12

Lesson Plan Type

Standard Lesson

Estimated Time

Three 50-minute sessions

Lesson Author

Publisher

Published Comments Post a Comment Send Us Feedback Lucy Mallett
August 27, 2014

I'm currently planning lessons for 'Beloved' and I am so grateful that someone is willing to share their wonderful resources.
Thank you so much!

Have you tried this lesson? If so, what worked well for you? Did you make any changes? Do you have different resources to recommend? Share your thoughts here.

We are always working to improve our content. Please contact us to share your thoughts about this lesson plan, including any concerns or suggestions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Narrative Structure and Perspectives in Toni Morrison's Beloved - ReadWriteThink

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
ReadWriteThink couldn't publish all of this great content without literacy experts to write and review for us. If you've got lessons plans, videos, activities, or other ideas you'd like to contribute, we'd love to hear from you. Find the latest in professional publications, learn new techniques and strategies, and find out how you can connect with other literacy professionals.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At a glimpse, it might seem quite uncanny to compare two such seemingly dissimilar works as Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and A Passage to India by E.M. Forster. Apart from disparity in their length and structure (Heart of Darkness: a novella, A Passage to India: a fully developed novel), the two narratives are separated by a generation and were produced in differing periods of each writer's career. Each of the two novelists emerged from a very different background and had a very unique upbringing. In the case of Conrad, the novella is the direct outcome of his experiences as in charge of a small river steamboat in the African Congo in 1890. For his part, E.M. Forster, after having traveled so often through India, seems to have produced A Passage to India as a result of his own 'passages' there.

Regardless of all these factual differences, the two novels have much in common. Both works deal with the issues of colonialism and not only 'fall' into the category of post-colonial literature, but doubtlessly trigger a lot of debatable problems related to colonialism that otherwise lay hidden under the feigned integrity of the British rule. Just as Heart of Darkness, though apparently dealing with an ordinary seaman's journey, is claimed not to be a 'typical' one, similarly, the "Passage" that Mrs. Moore and Adela Quested take to India is a lot more than simply a passage. This multiplicity of meaning makes it quite obvious that both the novels must be comprehended at various reading levels in order to derive complete essence out of them.

Both the novels carry the burden of factual evidence from specific eras of history. A Passage to India puts before our eyes the time of decline of the British Empire following World War I, while Heart of Darkness takes us into the realm of the European Imperial Powers resulting in a lot of scuttling in Africa. In this way, both E.M. Forster and Joseph Conrad can be taken as perfect examples of the writers who could explicitly voice the mood of a particular moment in history. The views of natives expressed in both the novels against 'imperialism' and its impact are the epitome of their times. 'Social Darwinism' and 'Euro-centrism' are two notions directly traced by both the novelists in a thorough manner. Only the 'Fittest' could survive in the world depicted by them and the only possible 'center' for the production of 'fitness' in that world was doubtlessly considered to be 'Europe'.

The mastery of the production of outstanding characters that fix so well in their actual costumes of history can only be the trait of an exceptional writer. Both Conrad and Forster are bestowed with this trait which they exhibit well in these two masterpieces. Both stories are related from the viewpoints of European characters who find themselves in foreign lands as direct representatives of a European power or due to some connection with imperial activity, although A Passage to India is unusual in a way that it also throws light on the viewpoint of a colonial native. Conrad's characters take up their roles and move ahead with the flow. Kurtz is one of the most skillfully created characters in both psychological and moral terms. He is depicted as a representative of the entire Western civilization. Just like Ted Hughes's 'Hawk' in 'Hawk Roosting' boasts about itself that: 'It took the whole of creation/To produce my foot, my each feather/Now I hold Creation in my foot', similarly, 'All Europe contributed to making of Kurtz' which gave vent to his 'unspeakable rites' and 'unsound methods'. His conclusion at the end to 'Exterminate all the brutes", seen in the political-cum-moral dimension, can be considered as capitalist exploitation aspiring at world supremacy. Forster's characters are very strong and fully developed. Like Conrad, we find him focusing on the trials of the individual in a situation of moral isolation leading either to destruction or illumination. Dr. Aziz, a mess of extremes and contradictions, seems to be an embodiment of Forster's notion of the 'muddle' of India. Directly or indirectly, Forster wants us to see many of the characteristics of Dr. Aziz as the traits of many of the Indians in general. Fielding is yet another interesting character in the novel. Just as Marlow serves as an intermediary between the two extremes of Kurtz and the Company, similarly, Fielding appears to be a moderator between the Court and Dr. Aziz.

Human Relations and their limitations is yet another very important aspect recurring time and again in both the novels. Forster is exceedingly drifted towards humanistic philosophy and his characters turn out to be good subjects for psychoanalysis. Nowhere do we find his voice clearer and louder than in A Passage to India, in which human relations are pushed to the very limits, trying to break boundaries of numerous kinds and attempting to bridge the gap between cultures and castes, a gap that remains as wide as ever by the end. Despite Dr. Aziz's claim that "This picnic is nothing to do with English or Indian; it is an expedition of friends", he has to pay a heavy price for attempting to be intimate with English people even though everything gets resolved in his favor ultimately. We certainly agree with the idea the result is just a disaster 'when English people and Indians attempt to be intimate socially.' Similarly, Heart of Darkness can also be studied as Marlow's journey into the depths of human psyche and relations. The darkness becomes a prejudice that fails to see other culture as humans and rejects all sorts of intimacy between people of different races.

Symbolism is an important tool for writers. But for some particular writers, this tool turns into a very powerful weapon with which they can not only defend their thoughts well but very skillfully convince their readers to support their standpoint. Both Conrad and Forster own this very weapon and utilize it fully in their work. The landscape, rivers, caves and even various characters are taken as symbols representing very complex ideas.

Darkness is associated with almost all the places and people that Marlow comes across including his own self. The river Thames, like the dark Africa, turns out to be one of the dark places. 'And this also,' said Marlow suddenly, 'has been one of the dark places of the world' (Conrad 7). The river that Marlow travels in serves as a multi-level symbol in the novel as do the Marabar Caves in A Passage to India. Each of these 'nature' symbols represents not only a number of ideas but at the same time they remain the vague center of each idea. The river that, according to Marlow, resembled 'an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest, curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land' reminds us of the snakes that Dr.Aziz mentions to Mrs. Moore , saying, "There are bad characters about and leopards may come across from the Marabar Hills. Snakes also."

The experience that Miss Quested had at the caves can also be taken as the realization of her own inner darkness. The hysteria she experienced afterwards could also be compared with the last words of Kurtz, 'The horror, the horror'. The Fact that Mrs. Moore had a similar feeling of awe after hearing the echo in one of the caves is another hint into the power of the symbol of Caves. Dark as they apparently are, these caves seem to be laden with the ability to throw light on the inner darkness of humans. Like Coleridge's 'caverns measureless to man/down to a sunless sea' presented in 'Kubla Khan' , these Malabar caves of India have their own awe, their own terror and their own dreadful impact.

The endings of both the novels leave a somewhat similar impact on the readers. While everything seems to 'lead into the heart of an immense darkness' for Conrad's protagonist, all the forces of nature seem to deny the union of East and West in the world of Dr. Aziz and Fielding. 'No, not yet,' and the sky said, 'No, not there.'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Comparative Analysis of Heart of Darkness and A Passage to India | Literature Essay Samples

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At a glimpse, it might seem quite uncanny to compare two such seemingly dissimilar works as Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and A Passage to India by E.M. Forster. Apart from disparity in their length and structure (Heart of Darkness: a novella, A Passage to India: a fully developed novel), the two narratives are separated by a generation and were produced in differing periods of each writer's career.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Toni Morrison uses the color red in multiple ways in her novel Beloved. On one hand red is a symbol of vibrancy and life, often revealing life in unexpected places. It also symbolizes pain and death, though death does not signify absence in a book where the dead have a very lively presence in human lives. Beautiful but terrible, red is desired and feared by the characters and often signifies important turning points in the book.Several of Beloved's characters express desire for red, showing it as a positive symbol of birth, life, and emotion. Denver, who has not left 124 for twelve years, longs for color and vibrancy. To Denver, Beloved's arrival signifies the return of the vibrancy that she has missed most: that of a companion. Beloved's worth to Denver is made clear through Denver's love of colors, and red in particular, for Denver is willing to give up "the most violent of sunsets...and all the blood of autumn and settle for the palest yellow if it comes from her Beloved" (143). Beloved, also, is captivated by the color red. Though she has experienced more than enough vibrancy in her own life, her eyes follow the "blood spot" of a cardinal in the leaves of a nearby tree, "hungry for another glimpse" (119). To Beloved, red represents the emotion that she has kept inside for eighteen years. Beloved's need for feeling leads to her affair with Paul D and spurs her desire for vividly colored clothes, such as the dress Denver eventually wears to visit Lady Jones, "a dress so loud it embarrassed the needlepoint chair seat" (291) Amy Denver, the whitegirl from whom Denver receives her name, has a fascination with "carmine" velvet. Though she has most likely never before left her home town, Amy is willing to travel "a hundred miles, maybe more" to find some red velvet of her own (41). Amy's description of the velvet as "like the world was just born" strengthens the connection of the color red to birth and life (40). Though admired for its beauty, red appears both as an overt and implied symbol of blood and death, reminding the reader about Sethe's past. Beloved sometimes opens her neck wounds, terrifying Sethe and using the "rubies of blood" to get what she wants (294). Sethe is horrified by this image because it reminds her of the murder she committed eighteen years ago and disproves her frequent insistence that "I don't have to explain a thing" (236). The reopening of Beloved's wounds reflects the fact that nothing has truly healed and that Sethe can never fully forgive herself for the act. Besides the clear references to red blood, Morrison relates the color red to violence and death in several other places. Stamp Paid often plays with a red ribbon, found attached to part of a black child's scalp in the "Licking River" (212). Stamp carries the ribbon at all times as a reminder of the cruelty of whites and the struggle of black people. When Paul D enters 124 for the first time, he encounters "a pool of red, undulating light that locked him where he stood" (10). The light is the presence of the baby ghost, showing that dead things are by no means gone from the world of the living. Upon Paul D's arrival, the women of 124 have lived with the light and other reminders of Beloved for eighteen years, allowing the ghost to become part of daily life; when Paul D forces Beloved out, she returns in person, stronger than ever. The color of the blood, ribbon and light connects them to the events of the past.Paul D and Baby Suggs' reluctance to acknowledge the color red demonstrates their fear of the past and their own emotions. Paul D's frustration over the freedom of the red rooster, Mister, stems from his own powerlessness. He is jealous of the rooster because Mister is able to display his colors, but Paul D's captors have taken away his identity. The loss of his freedom also leads to an inability to feel, which Paul D equates to the sealing of a "tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be" (86). After all the trials he has been through, Paul D is afraid to be emotional or allow himself to love. For years, he has thought it best to "protect yourself and love small" (191), but he is eventually unable to keep his emotions in check around Sethe and Beloved. His affair with Beloved causes the tobacco tin to open and his "red heart" to reemerge (138). Paul D's refusal to open the tobacco tin reflects his fear that the things he loves will again be taken from him and a deeper fear that he is no longer able to love. Baby Sugg's bedridden contemplation of colors shows that she may be as afraid of red and the emotion it carries as Paul D is. Though she spends most of her last eight years of life pondering colors, Baby Suggs never manages to think about red. Baby's desire to "fix on something harmless in this world," and unwillingness to think about red contrast with her earlier view that all life and emotion must be embraced, showing her acceptance of white dominance (211).The color red represents the two extremes of life and death in Beloved and is therefore both feared and coveted by the characters. The young and naïve Denver, Beloved and Amy embrace red, seeing only its vibrant and positive aspects. The older characters, who have lived through the hardships of slavery, are more wary of the color. Sethe admits that "me and Beloved outdid ourselves with [red]" and cannot erase the color of her daughter's blood from her mind (237). Morrison's use of the color red as a symbol makes the connection between the living and the dead powerful in Beloved and makes the reader question traditional beliefs about life after death.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Color Red in Morrison's Beloved | Literature Essay Samples

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Toni Morrison uses the color red in multiple ways in her novel Beloved. On one hand red is a symbol of vibrancy and life, often revealing life in unexpected places. It also symbolizes pain and death, though death does not signify absence in a book where the dead have a very lively presence in human lives.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
From frustration...

...to understanding

The ravenous throng scampered toward the delectable viands, which the chef had impeccably arrayed on the table.

The extremely hungry crowd ran toward the delicious food, which the chef had extremely well organized (into rows) on the table.

Rewordify.com simplifies difficult English. Enter hard sentences (or whole chapters) into the yellow box at the top of the page. (You can also enter a web site URL.) Click Rewordify text and you'll instantly see an easier version, for fast understanding. The reworded words are highlighted- click them to hear and learn the original harder word. You can change how the highlighting works to match the way you learn!

Do you dislike dictionaries because they're confusing and unhelpful? You'll love Rewordify.com's clear, easy-to-understand definitions-they change to match the original word or phrase's part of speech, verb tense, and singular/plural form, so they make sense. Our amazing Rewordifying Engine is what makes it all possible, and no other web site has it.

Want to see something now? Click Classic Literature at the top and start reading-easier.

Learn more words faster. Our exclusive Learning Sessions actively teach you words so you learn them. Any time you paste in a block of text, our software finds all the hard words, lets you pick which ones you want to learn, and then teaches them to you in a Learning Session.

A Learning Session isn't an online quiz: it's an effective, step by step process where you hear words and phrases, type them, and read them. The software re-teaches you exactly what you need when you need it, and moves ahead when you're ready. When you've learned a word, the site stops "rewording" it, so the site grows with you as you learn! Learn more about Learning Sessions.

Learn the way you want-from what you want to read. You can change the way the site works to fit your learning style as you read and learn from almost any text passage or web page. See the different highlighting styles in the box? You can pick any of them, and lots more options. Click the Settings link (at the bottom of the page now, or at the top of any page) to see all the choices you have. (The demo text in the box here never changes.)

Chart your progress and have fun. You can keep track of your learning with lots of detailed charts that show how you're doing. Plus, as you use the site, you earn points and get Learning Stars -a fun reward for reading and learning!

Now you can easily get your students involved in their learning: let them select the text that interests them. Let them print and complete the activities with which they're most comfortable. Imagine each student learning vocabulary customized to his or her interests, while you have time to teach instead of typing. Could differentiation by interest or readiness be any easier? You can start doing it today, for free.

You never have to type another vocabulary list or quiz again.

Type (or copy-paste) in any block of text in the yellow box at the top of this page, click Rewordify text, and click the Print/Learning activities button. Here's how. You (or your students!) can select from a rich variety of quizzes and learning activities, with or without answer keys.

Do you need to teach (or not teach) particular vocabulary words and phrases? Rewordify.com gives you the exact control you need for specialized vocabulary instruction. You can make customized word lists so the site rewords and teaches any word or phrase exactly the way you want.

Learn the way you want-from what you want to read. You can change the way the site works to fit your learning style as you read and learn from almost any text passage or web page. See the different highlighting styles in the box? You can pick any of them, and lots more options. Click the Settings link (at the bottom of the page now, or at the top of any page) to see all the choices you have. (The demo text in the box here never changes.)

Chart your progress and have fun. You can keep track of your learning with lots of detailed charts that show how you're doing. Plus, as you use the site, you earn points and get Learning Stars -a fun reward for reading and learning!

Now you can easily get your students involved in their learning: let them select the text that interests them. Let them print and complete the activities with which they're most comfortable. Imagine each student learning vocabulary customized to his or her interests, while you have time to teach instead of typing. Could differentiation by interest or readiness be any easier? You can start doing it today, for free.

Save all your documents online so anyone can read them and learn from them at any time.

Just log in, rewordify something, and click the Share button.

Select how public or private you want the document, enter the title, author, etc., and you're done!

You get a link that you can put in your online lesson plans, teacher web pages, or blog. No more rewordifying the same thing over and over again!

You can view, manage and edit all your documents from any computer. Just log in (or create a free, safe account) and start building your learning library. Here's how to do it.

At Educator Central, you can create and manage student accounts, monitor your students' learning, and get detailed reading and learning analytics that help you make smart classroom decisions. For free. Now.
(In a hurry? Log in. Click Educator Central at the top.)

In a few minutes, you can create student accounts on Rewordify.com, and easily monitor your students' reading and learning progress. Get actionable learning and error analytics as your students read and learn from any document you post, or from any document or web page they want to read.

Imagine each student learning different words based on his or her interest or ability level. It's easy to do: Rewordify.com designs and teaches individualized vocabulary lessons with our highly effective Learning Sessions, so you have the time to teach students the important stuff: how to learn, how to break through obstacles, how to believe the words "I can do it."

As your students read and learn, get detailed charts and reports that tell you what you need to know-by student, by class, or for all your classes.

Effectively match interventions with students, based on detailed error breakdowns that let you see what you need to see in a few clicks.

Student accounts are anonymous, and they keep your students safe and focused on learning.

Start using it now: Log in and click on Educator Central at the top. Read more about Educator Central.

Rewordify.com is free online software. You're using it now. There's nothing to buy or install. It works on any computer, tablet, or smartphone. Just point your browser to Rewordify.com and start reading and learning. Yes, it's tablet-friendly-no mouse needed. Yes, your whole school district can create teacher and student accounts, without entering any personal information. When? Now.

It's fast. Wasting your (and your students' time) is bad. That's why Rewordify.com was designed from the ground up to be lightning-fast and use very little data. The site doesn't have a hundred images of puppies and kittens and a hundred links to a hundred lists. What it does have is speed and ease of use, which are very nice when you have to teach a room full of teenagers. Or adults.

It's an app. Want the app? You're using it. Wasn't that easy? The site is a web app, which is great for you, because you get almost-daily site updates automatically -so you can read and learn, not download and install app updates.

We keep kids safe online. Rewordify.com requires no personal information. Student accounts are completely anonymous and cannot post or share anything. Read more about how we protect children's privacy.

Rewordify.com can display simplified versions of web pages. Our state-of-the-art web filtering technology blocks millions of inappropriate sites and questionable language, to protect kids online and keep them reading only what they should be reading. Read more about how we protect children from inappropriate material.

Difficult English is intelligently simplified with our exclusive Rewordifying Engine

Saves time when reading hard text, improves comprehension and self-confidence, and increases total reading time

Copy-paste entire text passages into the yellow box and press Rewordify text. You'll see a simplified version. Read more.

Definitions are easy to understand, context-aware, and match verb tense and part of speech

Reduces frustration and improves comprehension by maximizing time spent reading versus dictionary research

Copy-paste any text passage into the yellow box and "rewordify" it. Click the highlighted words. Read more.

Learning Sessions actively teach individualized vocabulary lessons with research-proven multimodal techniques

Improves vocabulary and word retention

After you "rewordify" text, you'll see a purple bar at the top. Click the buttons to pick hard words and learn them in an effective Learning Session. Read more.

Site carefully monitors student reading time, learning progress, and learning errors, and gives educators full-color, real-time charts and reports

Gives actionable learning data that helps improve student learning outcomes

Create an account. Click on Educator Central. Create free student accounts. Post assignments online. Get learning data. Make smart classroom decisions based on valid data. Read more.

Site identifies and extracts over 58,000 difficult words and phrases from any text and creates a rich variety of learning activities with answer keys

Saves time when teaching and gives students individualized learning activities

Copy-paste any text passage into the yellow box and "rewordify" it. Click Print/Learning Activities. Pick the quizzes, activities, vocab lists, cloze activities you want, with keys. Print them. Read more.

Software allows users to change the difficulty level and presentation style of the output text

Improves engagement by allowing easy differentiation by learning style and readiness

Copy-paste any text passage and "rewordify" it. Click Settings. Change the text presentation style, "rewordifying level" (difficulty level), even the highlighting style. Read more.

Site works as an app on any device, using a minimum of data

Allows for easy district rollout on nearly any existing device while conserving Internet bandwith

Point any device's browser to Rewordify.com and it works like an app. Here's how to make an app icon on your home screen or desktop.

Site calculates accurate text complexity measures, including our exclusive READ score

Improves engagement and learning through the selection of appropriate reading materials

Rewordify any text passage. Click the Stats button. Read more.

Site's browser app (bookmarklet) extracts most web pages to Rewordify.com for learning in one click

Improves engagement and total reading time through independent selection of high-interest materials

Install our free browser app. Browse the web. At any page, click the "Rewordify text" button. Read the extracted text on Rewordify.com.

You can post any document and share it publicly, privately, or with a password

Increases reading time and organization of learning materials

Log in. Paste in a document and "rewordify" it. Click the Share button, share it, and get a link. Post the link to your teacher page. Or, add it as a Rewordify.com assignment. Here's how to post documents. Here's how to create assignments.

Site calculates points and displays Learning Stars based on total minutes read and words learned

Increases reading time and engagement by making the site more fun

Log in and start reading and clicking on the purple bar to do Learning Sessions. Points and Learning Stars will display. Click My Learning/My Documents to see charts of your progress. Read more.

Over 300 pieces of classic literature are available

Improves comprehension of the classics-from Shakespeare to Douglass to Austen

Click Classic literature at the top. Or, type a word like Frankenstein into the search box at the top.

"Pretty remarkable..." - Time Magazine
"One of the most innovative websites..." - Jamie Martin, Noodle.com
"Will revolutionize your vocabulary instruction..." - Mrs. Waters' English (blog)
"This is AMAZING." - Mark Giufre, Educational Technology for All Learners
"You may be surprised at how useful it can be..." - Burnaby School District 41
"A fantastic web app..." - Kelly Tenkely, iLearn Technology Blog
"A great tool for students to have..." - Avi Spector, Beyond the Tools
"Excellent tool to enhance comprehension..." - Educational Technology and Mobile Learning
"A fantastic tool..." - Karen Janowski, EdTech Solutions
"This could be a great resource for students..." -Heidi Neltner, Learning In Progress
"Makes your life easier..." -Glenn Wiebe, History Tech blog
"The site has many amazing features..." -Dr. Albert P. Rayan, The New Indian Express
"Outstanding..." -Patric Barbieri, LABBB
"An extraordinary site..." -Larry Ferlazzo, edublogs.org
"So many possibilities..." -Jen Jones, Hello Literacy
"A fantastic teaching tool..." -David Kapuler (Review), Edshelf.com
"A must for saving and bookmarking for classroom use..." - TeachersFirst.com
"A great tool and easy to use..." - Bruce Ellis (Video on YouTube)
"I highly recommend checking out Rewordify..." - Technology Tidbits
"Huge potential for students" - Jody Watson (Video on YouTube)
"A cool web tool..." - David Keck
"Great teacher tools available..." -Holly Whitt, The Curious Librarian
"Immediate application for students..." -Anne Benninghof, Ideas for Educators

Here's what to do next:

First, do the demo. You'll be an expert in five minutes: Click here for the demo.

Learn the site, step by step. Our First-Time User Guide clearly shows you how to get started.

Teachers: Learn about Educator Central and all it can do to help improve student learning outcomes. Also, you can print lots of free, full-color literature to help you get started in the classroom.

Have some fun. Are you up for a vocabulary challenge? Play Rewordo and Difficult Hangman. Be aware: they're not easy.

Browse some classics. Want to be more sure of Shakespeare, or brush up on Bronte? Scroll to the top, and click the Classic Literature link. It's a fast way to get started using the site. Or, use the Search bar at the top. Try entering the word raven to understand the deal with Poe, that black bird, and the "Nevermore" thing.

Check out the goodies. You can install our One-Click Learning browser applet that lets you rewordify most web pages in one click. Our cool (and free, of course) School Clock tells you the current time and date, what class period you're currently in, countdowns to the next period, and more. You can customize it for any school's schedule, and make as many different School Clocks as you have different day schedules. Use it now.

Show the love! Please tell us about mistakes the site makes when "rewording" and defining words. That feedback is the single most valuable thing you can do to help the site (and learners around the world). Click here to contact us. Do you want to help defray the site's operating costs, and read a great thriller at the same time? You can! Get your copy of Electric Dawn.

Contact us. We want to help you! Please use the Contact page with any questions or comments.

Site summary: Rewordify.com helps with reading comprehension and vocabulary development by simplifying English to a lower reading level. It lets you reword a sentence or reword a paragraph. It will simplify English by reducing text complexity. It's a dictionary alternative that will improve comprehension and teach vocabulary. It's an important part of reading instruction and vocabulary instruction for ESL students, people with reading disabilities, people with a learning disability, or anyone who wants to improve reading skill.

29372 / 7.3

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rewordify.com | Understand what you read

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From frustration... ...to understanding Hearken! Anon thou shalt read tomes with more rapidity! Rewordify.com simplifies difficult English. Enter hard sentences (or whole chapters) into the yellow box at the top of the page. (You can also enter a web site URL.) Click Rewordify text and you'll instantly see an easier version, for fast understanding.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Book Summary

Beloved is not narrated chronologically; it is composed of flashbacks, memories, and nightmares. As a result, it is not an easy read if you haven't encountered William Faulkner, James Joyce, or Virginia Woolf. Following, we have constructed a basic outline of the action in the story. In no way, however, does it reflect the wonder of Morrison's novel.

Sethe, a 13-year-old child of unnamed slave parents, arrives at Sweet Home, an idyllic plantation in Kentucky operated by Garner, an unusually humane master, and his wife, Lillian. Within a year, Sethe selects Halle Suggs to be her mate and, by the time she is 18, bears him three children. After Garner dies, his wife turns control of the plantation over to her brother-in-law, the schoolteacher, who proves to be a brutal overseer.

Schoolteacher's cruelty drives the Sweet Home slave men - Paul D, Halle, Paul A, and Sixo - to plot their escape. In August, fearful that her sons will be sold, a very pregnant Sethe packs her children Howard, Buglar, and Beloved in a wagon and sends them to safety with their grandmother in Cincinnati. Schoolteacher discovers what she has done, and as Halle watches from the loft of a barn, schoolteacher takes notes as his nephews - the "two boys with mossy teeth" - suck the milk from Sethe's breasts. She reports the assault to the ailing Mrs. Garner. The nephews retaliate by beating Sethe with cowhide until her back is split open with wounds. Unknown to Sethe, schoolteacher roasts Sixo alive and hangs Paul A for trying to escape the plantation. Before she leaves Sweet Home, Sethe confronts Paul D, who is shackled in an iron collar for his part in the escape attempt. Sethe then makes her own escape.

Sethe flees through the woods and, with the help of Amy Denver, a runaway white indentured servant, gives birth to her fourth child. Then, with the help of Stamp Paid, a black ferryman, she crosses the Ohio river into freedom.

Safely reunited with her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and her babies in Cincinnati, Sethe enjoys 28 days of contentment. Then one day as Stamp Paid replenishes the woodpile and Baby Suggs and Sethe work in the yard, schoolteacher, the sheriff, a slave catcher, and one of schoolteacher's nephews arrive to recapture Sethe and her children. To spare her children a return to bondage, Sethe slices the throat of the eldest girl, tries to kill her two boys, and threatens to dash out the brains of her infant daughter, Denver. The sheriff takes Sethe and Denver to jail, and Sethe is condemned to hang. She leaves her cell long enough to attend her daughter's funeral. Three months later, pressure from the Quaker abolitionist Edward Bodwin and the Colored Ladies of Delaware, Ohio produces Sethe's freedom. She barters sex for a gravestone inscribed "Beloved" to mark her daughter's burial site. Immediately, Beloved's ghost makes itself known in Baby Suggs's house at 124 Bluestone Road.

Sethe is granted a release from her death sentence, but after leaving jail she finds the black community closed to her. With the aid of Mr. Bodwin, she locates work and manages to build a stable, though solitary, life. Her mother-in-law withdraws completely from the community and dies several years later. Shortly after Baby Suggs's death, Sethe's sons leave home, unnerved by the presence of Beloved's ghost. Left with only Denver, Sethe lives in uneasy solitude.

Years later, after escaping a cruel Georgia prison and wandering North, Paul D arrives in Cincinnati and reunites with Sethe. He immediately banishes the disruptive ghost from the house. The two former slaves attempt to form a family, although Denver is uncomfortable with Paul D's presence. Sethe and Paul D's relationship is interrupted by the appearance of a mysterious young woman who calls herself Beloved, the same name that is on the headstone of Sethe's murdered daughter.

Beloved quickly becomes a dominant force in Sethe's house. She drives Paul D out of Sethe's bed and seduces him. She becomes the sole focus of Sethe's life after Sethe realizes that this young woman is the reincarnation of her dead child. Drawing Sethe into an unhealthy, obsessive relationship, Beloved grows stronger while Sethe's body and mind weaken. Sethe quits her job and withdraws completely into the house. With the aid of Denver and some female neighbors, Sethe escapes Beloved's control through a violent scene in which she mistakes Bodwin for a slave catcher and tries to stab him with an ice pick. Beloved vanishes, and Paul D returns, helping Sethe rediscover the value of life and her own self-worth.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Beloved is not narrated chronologically; it is composed of flashbacks, memories, and nightmares. As a result, it is not an easy read if you haven't encountered William Faulkner, James Joyce, or Virginia Woolf. Following, we have constructed a basic outline of the action in the story.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
RARE Toni Morrison interview on "Beloved" (1987)

# data[].attributes.body
In Our Time - Heart of Darkness - BBC Sounds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
In Our Time - Heart of Darkness - BBC Sounds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
About this Lecture

In this module, we provide a close reading of one section of the novel - the moment when the slavecatcher arrives to re-capture the children.

About this Course

In this course, Professor Gina Wisker (University of Brighton) explores Toni Morrison's 1987 novel, Beloved. We begin by providing a broad introduction to Black women's writing, focusing in particular on the works of Alice Walker, Zora Neale Thurston and bell hooks, before moving on in the second module to think about the particular historical moment that Morrison writes about in Beloved - 1850s America. In the third module, we think about the 'politics' of writing, before looking in the fourth module at the presentation of women in novel - in particular Sethe, Baby Suggs, and Beloved herself. In the fifth module, we think about the presentation of the supernatural in novel, especially in its relation to race, before moving on in the sixth module to provide a close reading of a particular moment in the novel - where the slavecatcher arrives to take away Sethe's children.

About the Lecturer

Professor Gina Wisker is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Higher Education. Her principal teaching, PhD supervision and research interests lie in contemporary women's writing, Gothic, horror and postcolonial writing. Her published work includes Margaret Atwood, an Introduction to Critical Views of Her Fiction (2012), Key Concepts in Postcolonial Writing (2007), Horror Fiction (2005) and Postcolonial and African American Women's Writing (2000).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
About this Lecture In this module, we provide a close reading of one section of the novel - the moment when the slavecatcher arrives to re-capture the children. About this Course In this course, Professor Gina Wisker (University of Brighton) explores Toni Morrison's 1987 novel, Beloved.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
About this Course

In this course, Professor Emily West (University of Reading) explores the experience of enslaved women in the United States during the Antebellum Period (1815-61). In the first module, we provide a broad introduction to the history of slavery in the United States, as well as thinking about the key sources that historians can use to find out about the institution of slavery, and some of the methodological problems associated with these sources. In the second module, we think about the different kinds of work undertaken by enslaved women, before turning in the third module to enslaved women's wider roles within their families and communities and their resistance to oppression. In the fourth module, we think about the physical and sexual abuse suffered before enslaved women, before moving on in the fifth module to explore the relationship between enslaved women and slave-owning women. Finally, in the sixth module, we think about how life for enslaved women changed during and after the American Civil War.

About the Lecturer

Emily West is Professor of History at the University of Reading. Her research interests centre on issues of race and gender in American history, especially in relation to slavery in the US South. Her recent publications include Enslaved Women in America: From Colonial Times to Emancipation (2014) and Family or Freedom: Free People of Color in the Antebellum South (2012).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
About this Course In this course, Professor Emily West (University of Reading) explores the experience of enslaved women in the United States during the Antebellum Period (1815-61).

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.timsquirrell.com/blog/how-to-write-undergraduate-essays

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Conrad’s imperial horror story Heart of Darkness resonates with our globalised times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In our ongoing Guide to the Classics series, we look at Heart of Darkness: the product of dark historical energies that continue to shape our contemporary world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Slavery, Ghosts, and Beloved: Crash Course Literature 214

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Award-winning novelist Preti Taneja (We That Are Young) joins John and Andy to discuss Beloved by Toni Morrison, one of the greatest American novels of the last half century. Other books featured on this episode are It's Gone Dark Over Bill's Mother's by Lisa Blower and The House on Vesper Sands by Paraic O'Donnell.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Award-winning novelist Preti Taneja (We That Are Young) joins John and Andy to discuss Beloved by Toni Morrison, one of the greatest American novels of the last half century. Other books featured on this episode are It's Gone Dark Over Bill's Mother's by Lisa Blower and The House on Vesper Sands by Paraic O'Donnell.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Slavery and Motherhood in Toni Morrison's "Beloved"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Toni Morrison's "Beloved" is discussed not as a presentation of slavery, but rather of motherhood. Slavery and motherhood are considered convertib...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Toni Morrison, the Nobel laureate who died Monday night at the age of 88, was widely considered to be one of the great living American writers. And an enormous part of her literary legacy was the work she did to establish and extend the black American literary canon, both in her own writing and in the work she did as an editor.

Morrison's status as one of the great American novelists, full stop, developed late in life: When she first came up, she was considered to be one of the great black women American novelists, who was maybe not in the same league as writers who were white and male. She was ghettoized for both her race and her gender.

"I wish that Toni Morrison, a bedazzling writer and a great human being, had won her prize only for her excellence at stringing words together," said writerErica Jong when Morrison won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993. "I suspect, however, that her prize was not motivated solely by artistic considerations. Why can't art in itself be enough? Must we also use the artist as a token of progressivism?"

Morrison herself was ambivalent about the public's focus on her race and gender. "I'm already discredited, I'm already politicized, before I get out of the gate," she told the essayist Hilton Als in 2003. But, she added, "I can accept the labels because being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn't limit my imagination; it expands it. It's richer than being a white male writer because I know more and I've experienced more."

Morrison believed the black American experience was worthy of sustained aesthetic attention, and not just so that white people could learn valuable lessons about race. "I didn't want it to be a teaching tool for white people," she told Als of her work. "I wanted it to be true - not from outside the culture, as a writer looking back at it. I wanted it to come from inside the culture, and speak to people inside the culture. It was about a refusal to pander or distort or gain political points. I wanted to reveal and raise questions."

And Morrison didn't only pursue that goal in her work as a novelist. She also spent more than a decade working as an editor at Random House, where she championed the work of black authors. It was therethat she helped put in place the raw material for a black American literary canon.

"Before the late sixties, there was no real Black Studies curriculum in the academy - let alone a post-colonial-studies program or a feminist one," wrote Als for the New Yorker. "As an editor and author, Morrison, backed by the institutional power of Random House, provided the material for those discussions to begin."

Morrison published Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, and Angela Davis. She published the autobiography of Muhammad Ali. But perhaps her greatest legacy as an editor was compiling and publishing The Black Book, a lavishly illustrated primary source collection that documents black American history. It didn't sell well, but it became a landmark in black studies. And even when it first came out, it was deeply meaningful to those who picked it up - including an incarcerated man who wrote Morrison to thank her for putting it together. "And then he said, 'I need two more copies, because I need one to pass out to other people, and I need another one to throw up against the wall," Morrison told Als. "'And I need the one I have to hold close.'"

The opening paragraph to Beloved captures the lyricism and intellectual force that made Morrison great

In her own writing, Morrison lavished the underdiscussed lives of black women with language. Her prose is lyrical almost as a default; it is rhythmic and vivid; it sings. In her hands, to write lyrically feels like an act of both love and defiance.

But in her most famous novel, , about an escaped enslaved woman who kills her baby daughter to prevent her from being taken by slave catchers, Morrison had to balance her tendency toward lyricism with the starkness of her subject matter.

"In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout," she writes in the preface to Beloved; "that the order and quietude of everyday life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must first get out of the way."

In Beloved, the ghost of slavery is literal and inescapable. Sethe, the desperate mother based on the historical Margaret Garner, may no longer be enslaved as the novel opens, but she can never forget what slavery as an institution did to her as a person: that it made her kill her infant daughter, Beloved.

When a young woman claiming to be the now-adult Beloved comes to Sethe's house, Sethe begins to believe that she may at last be able to forget: that if Beloved is truly alive, then what Sethe did to her never happened, and so slavery may be erased, forgotten, papered over. But it rapidly and inexorably becomes clear that forgetting is impossible.

And so Morrison's every sentence is heavy with dread and grief, a personal grief rendered universal and historical. But what's astonishing is that it's still beautiful, still luxurious to read, even when Morrison is making her language "get out of the way" as much as possible.

The opening paragraph of Beloved captures that dread and that beauty as well as anything else Morrison ever wrote:

124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old - as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the doorsill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once - the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be born or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn't have a number then, because Cincinnati didn't stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them.

The ghost of Beloved is everywhere here, with the "venom" and "lively spite" of a murdered baby seething its way through the very house where Sethe lives. This is a house that is haunted by an atrocity, and that atrocity was created by slavery, now rendered domestic and personal and intimate, confined to the "spiteful" house of 124.

But even while that atrocity breathes its way through the language, the prose remains beautiful to read. Look at the way the two parentheticals in the third sentence balance each other as both Buglar and Howard reach their tipping point and leave the house; the way they make the narrator's voice get slightly mannered for a moment, as though we are at the beginning of a Victorian fairy tale for children. And then notice how the "lively spite the house felt for them" at the end of the paragraph wrenches us out of that cozy fairy tale space, into someplace still a little supernatural - it's a world where houses can have feelings - but altogether more unsettling and unsettled.

Morrison's language is always this precise and controlled in its effects, and it is always reaching for a bigger and more indelible story. That's why her legacy - both as an editor and as a novelist - is going to outlive us all.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Toni Morrison's immortal legacy, explained in one passage

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Toni Morrison, the Nobel laureate who died Monday night at the age of 88, was widely considered to be one of the great living American writers. And an enormous part of her literary legacy was the work she did to establish and extend the black American literary canon, both in her own writing and in the work she did as an editor.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Do you want to get more out of your reading? This free course, Approaching prose fiction, is designed to develop the analytical skills you need for a more in-depth study of literary texts. You will...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Conrad was an innovative novelist as well as one of the finest stylists of modern English literature. His novels are complex moral and psychological examinations of the ambiguous nature of good and evil. His characters are repeatedly forced to acknowledge their own failings and the weakness of their ideals against all forms of corruption; the most honorable characters are those who realize their fallibility but still struggle to uphold the dictates of conscience. To examine these dilemmas, Conrad devised narrative techniques that more completely involve the reader in the conflicts of his characters than did traditional novels.

Conrad was born in 1857 in a Russian-ruled province of Poland. He was exiled with his parents to northern Russia in 1863 following his parents' participation in the Polish independence movement. His parents' health rapidly deteriorated in Russia, and, after their deaths in 1868, Conrad lived in the homes of relatives, where he was often ill and received sporadic schooling. At sixteen, Conrad pursued a career as a seaman, sailing to Martinique and the West Indies. Although he knew very little English at the time, he joined the British merchant marines in 1878; during his ten years of service, he became a naturalized British citizen, traveled to Africa, Australia, India, and the Orient, rose to the rank of Captain in the service, and mastered the English language.

Poor health forced Conrad to retire from the merchant marines. In 1894, he began a career as a writer, basing much of his work on his experience as a seaman. Conrad wrote much of his first novel, (1895), while he was still in the service. Regarding its publication in 1895, Conrad later remarked: "the only doubt I suffered, after the publication of was whether I should write another line for print...." Conrad struggled for the rest of his life to earn a living as a writer. In addition to his financial difficulties, he found writing in English to be a slow and agonizing ordeal, and many critics have noted the effects upon his work of such lifelong conditions as neurasthenia and fear of inadequacy. While the 1913 novel was Conrad's first financial and critical success, his novels and short stories published during the first decade of the twentieth century are currently regarded as his most important and enduring works. Conrad suffered a heart attack and died in his home in Kent, England, in 1924.

Throughout his career, Conrad examined the impossibility of living by a traditional code of conduct: his novels postulate that the complexity of the human spirit allows neither absolute fidelity to any ideal nor even to one's conscience. In Conrad's work, failure is a fact of human existence, and every ideal contains the possibilities for its own corruption. This is portrayed most effectively in (1904), which deals with revolution, politics, and financial manipulation in a South American republic. All of the characters in this novel are corrupted by their ambitions, which range from greed to idealistic desires for reform, and all their ambitions lead to disaster-the nobler the ideal, the greater their self-disgust.

Most of Conrad's greatest works take place on a ship or in the backwaters of civilization. A ship or a small outpost offered an isolated environment where Conrad could develop his already complex moral problems without unnecessary entanglements that might obscure the concentration of tragedy. The two greatest examples of moral tragedy in his work are (1900), which examines the failures of a man before society and his own conscience, and (1899), a dreamlike tale of mystery and adventure set in central Africa that is also the story of a man's symbolic journey into his own inner being. In both of these novels an understanding of the role of the narrator, Marlow, is crucial to a more complete comprehension of Conrad's intentions. Marlow offers a tentative view of a complex and ambiguous world. He is the most refined example of Conrad's use of an unreliable narrator, but in all of his works he relies upon time shifts, flashbacks, and multiple perspectives to portray the unreliability of human perception. The reader is constantly forced to interpret and reinterpret the information that Conrad's characters present. In his preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (1897), an essay that has been called his artistic credo, Conrad expressed his intention of forcing the reader's involvement in his work: "My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you feel-it is, before all, to make you That-and no more, and it is everything."

is widely recognized as Conrad's most ambitious novel. An account of a revolution in the fictitious South American country of Costaguana, examines the ideals, motivations, and failures of several participants in that conflict. Critics agree that represents an important development in Conrad's career. His earlier works, including provide an intense analysis of a few characters, while in the political novels, beginning with and including Conrad widened his scope to examine an entire society. Conrad himself referred to as his "largest canvas," and many critics consider the novel one of the greatest of the twentieth century.

Conrad's current reputation rests with such relatively early works as Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, in which imagery, symbolism, and shifts in time and perspective combine to create an intriguing, mystical series of fictional settings. In his later works, Conrad's examination of the ambiguity of good and evil is generally considered too stylized and heavy-handed. His most highly regarded works, however, are acknowledged as masterpieces of English literature and continue to generate significant critical commentary.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) - Glenbrook Academy English ~ Mr. Allen

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Conrad was an innovative novelist as well as one of the finest stylists of modern English literature. His novels are complex moral and psychological examinations of the ambiguous nature of good and evil.

# data[].attributes.body
IB Language and Literature – When in Rome…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In a myth told by the Igbo people of Nigeria, men once decided to send a messenger to ask Chuku, the supreme god, if the dead could be permitted to come back to life. As their messenger, they chose a dog. But the dog delayed, and a toad, which had been eavesdropping, reached Chuku first. Wanting to punish man, the toad reversed the request, and told Chuku that after death men did not want to return to the world. The god said that he would do as they wished, and when the dog arrived with the true message he refused to change his mind. Thus, men may be born again, but only in a different form.

The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe recounts this myth, which exists in hundreds of versions throughout Africa, in one of his essays. Sometimes, Achebe writes, the messenger is a chameleon, a lizard, or another animal; sometimes the message is altered accidentally rather than maliciously. But the structure remains the same: men ask for immortality and the god is willing to grant it, but something goes wrong and the gift is lost forever. "It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose!" Achebe writes. "For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth . . . horrors can descend again on mankind."

The myth holds another lesson as well-one that has been fundamental to the career of Achebe, who has been called "the patriarch of the African novel." There is danger in relying on someone else to speak for you: you can trust that your message will be communicated accurately only if you speak with your own voice. With his masterpiece, "Things Fall Apart," one of the first works of fiction to present African village life from an African perspective, Achebe began the literary reclamation of his country's history from generations of colonial writers. Published fifty years ago-a new edition has just appeared, from Anchor ($10.95)-it has been translated into fifty languages and has sold more than ten million copies.

In the course of a writing life that has included five novels, collections of short stories and poetry, and numerous essays and lectures, Achebe has consistently argued for the right of Africans to tell their own story in their own way, and has attacked the representations of European writers. But he also did not reject European influence entirely, choosing to write not in his native Igbo but in English, a language that, as he once said, "history has forced down our throat." In a country with several major languages and more than five hundred smaller ones, establishing a lingua franca was a practical and political necessity. For Achebe, it was also an artistic necessity-a way to give expression to the clash of civilizations that is his enduring theme.

Achebe was born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe in 1930, in the region of southeastern Nigeria known as Igboland. (He dropped his first name, a "tribute to Victorian England," in college.) Ezenwa-Ohaeto, the author of the first comprehensive biography of Achebe, writes that the young Chinua was raised at a cultural "crossroads": his parents were converts to Christianity, but other relatives practiced the traditional Igbo faith, in which people worship a panoply of gods, and are believed to have their own personal guiding spirit, called a chi. Achebe was fascinated by the "heathen" religion of his neighbors. "The distance becomes not a separation but a bringing together, like the necessary backward step which a judicious viewer may take in order to see a canvas steadily and fully," he later observed.

At home, the family spoke Igbo (sometimes also spelled Ibo), but Achebe began to learn English in school at the age of about eight, and he soon won admission to a colonial-run boarding school. Since the students came from different regions, they had to "put away their different mother tongues and communicate in the language of their colonizers," Achebe writes. There he had his first exposure to colonialist classics such as "Prester John," John Buchan's novel about a British adventurer in South Africa, which contains the famous line "That is the difference between white and black, the gift of responsibility." Achebe, in an essay called "African Literature as Restoration of Celebration," has written, "I did not see myself as an African to begin with. . . . The white man was good and reasonable and intelligent and courageous. The savages arrayed against him were sinister and stupid or, at the most, cunning. I hated their guts."

At University College, Ibadan, Achebe encountered the novel "Mister Johnson," by the Anglo-Irish writer Joyce Cary, who had spent time as a colonial officer in Nigeria. The book was lauded by Time as "the best novel ever written about Africa." But Achebe, as he grew older, no longer identified with the imperialists; he was appalled by Cary's depiction of his homeland and its people. In Cary's portrait, the "jealous savages . . . live like mice or rats in a palace floor"; dancers are "grinning, shrieking, scowling, or with faces which seemed entirely dislocated, senseless and unhuman, like twisted bags of lard." It was the image of blacks as "unhuman," a standard trope of colonial literature, that Achebe recognized as particularly dangerous. "It began to dawn on me that although fiction was undoubtedly fictitious it could also be true or false, not with the truth or falsehood of a news item but as to its disinterestedness, its intention, its integrity," he wrote later. This belief in fiction's moral power became integral to his vision for African literature.

"Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond." From the first line of "Things Fall Apart"-Achebe's first novel-we are in unfamiliar territory. Who is this Okonkwo whom everybody knows? Where are these nine villages? Achebe began to write "Things Fall Apart" during the mid-fifties, when he moved to Lagos to join the Nigerian Broadcasting Service. In 1958, when he submitted the manuscript to the publisher William Heinemann, no one knew what to make of it. Alan Hill, a director of the firm, recalled the initial reaction: "Would anyone possibly buy a novel by an African? There are no precedents." That was not entirely accurate-the Nigerian writers Amos Tutuola and Cyprian Ekwensi had published novels earlier in the decade. But the novel as an African form was still very young, and "Things Fall Apart" represented a new approach, showing the collision of old and new ways of life to devastating effect.

Set in a fictional group of Igbo villages called Umuofia sometime around the beginning of the twentieth century, "Things Fall Apart" begins with an episodic, almost dreamlike chronicle of village life through the family of Okonkwo. A boy named Ikemefuna has just come from outside Umuofia to live with them, and soon becomes like a brother to Okonkwo's son Nwoye. (Ikemefuna's father had killed a woman from Umuofia, and the villagers agreed to accept a virgin and a young man as compensation.) Over the next three years, the story follows Okonkwo's family through harvest seasons, religious festivals, and domestic disputes. The language is rich with metaphors drawn from the villagers' experience: Ikemefuna "grew rapidly like a yam tendril in the rainy season, and was full of the sap of life." The dialogue, too, is aphoristic and allusive. "Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten," the narrator explains. (As the reader has already seen, palm oil is used to flavor yams, the villagers' staple food.)

Despite the pastoral setting, there is nothing idyllic about this portrayal of village life. If the yam harvest is bad, the villagers go hungry. Babies are not expected to live to adulthood. (Only after the age of six is a child said to have "come to stay.") Some customs are cruel: newborn twins, thought to be inhabited by evil spirits, are "thrown away" in the bush. The Igbo are not presented as a museum exhibit-if their behavior is not always familiar, their emotions are. In a pivotal scene, a group of men, including Okonkwo, lead Ikemefuna out of the village after the local oracle determines that he must be killed. The boy thinks that he is at last returning home, and he worries that his mother will not be there to greet him. To calm himself, he resorts to a childhood game:

He sang [a song] in his mind, and walked to its beat. If the song ended on his right foot, his mother was alive. If it ended on his left, she was dead. No, not dead, but ill. It ended on the right. She was alive and well. He sang the song again, and it ended on the left. But the second time did not count. The first voice gets to Chukwu, or God's house. That was a favorite saying of children.

Tradition holds the people together, but it also drives them apart. After Nwoye finds out that his father killed Ikemefuna, "something seemed to give way inside him, like the snapping of a tightened bow." When the first missionaries arrive, those who have suffered most under the village culture are the first to join the church. To Okonkwo's dismay, Nwoye is among them. The missionaries, though ignorant of local customs, are not all bad: one in particular treats the villagers with respect. But others show little interest in their way of life. "Does the white man understand our custom about land?" Okonkwo asks a friend in puzzlement. "How can he when he does not even speak our tongue?" the other man responds. In the book's final chapter, the colonizer's voice takes over; the silence that surrounds it speaks for itself.

Western reviewers praised Achebe's detailed portrayal of Igbo life, but they said little about the book's literary qualities. The New York Times repeatedly misspelled Okonkwo's name and lamented the disappearance of "primitive society." The Listener complimented Achebe's "clear and meaty style free of the dandyism often affected by Negro authors." Others were openly hostile. "How would novelist Achebe like to go back to the mindless times of his grandfather instead of holding the modern job he has in broadcasting in Lagos?" the British journalist Honor Tracy asked. Reviewing Achebe's third novel, "Arrow of God" (1964), which forms a thematic trilogy with "Things Fall Apart" and its successor, "No Longer at Ease" (1960), another critic disparaged the book's language as "folk-patter."

This was a grotesque misreading. In a 1965 essay titled "The African Writer and the English Language," Achebe explains that he had no desire to write English in the manner of a native speaker. Rather, an African writer "should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience." To demonstrate, he quotes several lines from "Arrow of God." Ezeulu, the village's chief priest, is curious to find out about the activities of the new missionaries in the village:

I want one of my sons to join these people and be my eyes there. If there is nothing in it you will come back. But if there is something there you will bring home my share. The world is like a Mask, dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place. My spirit tells me that those who do not befriend the white man today will be saying had we known tomorrow. Achebe then rewrites the passage, preserving its content but stripping its style:

I am sending you as my representative among these people-just to be on the safe side in case the new religion develops. One has to move with the times or else one is left behind. I have a hunch that those who fail to come to terms with the white man may well regret their lack of foresight.

By deploying stock English phrases in unfamiliar ways, Achebe expresses his characters' estrangement from that language. The phrases that Ezeulu uses-"be my eyes," "bring home my share"-have no exact equivalents in Achebe's "translation." And how great the gap between "my spirit tells me" and "I have a hunch"! In the same essay, Achebe writes that carrying the full weight of African experience requires "a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings." Or, as he later put it, "Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English for we intend to do unheard of things with it."

Achebe's views on English were not yet widely accepted. At a conference on African literature held in Uganda in 1962, attended by emerging figures such as the Nigerian poet and playwright Wole Soyinka and the Kenyan novelist James Ngugi, the writers tried and failed to define "African literature," unable to decide whether it should be characterized by the nationalities of the writers or by its subject matter. Afterward, the critic Obi Wali published an article claiming that African literature had come to a "dead end," which could be reopened only when "these writers and their western midwives accept the fact that true African literature must be written in African languages." Ngugi came to agree: he wrote four novels in English, but in the nineteen-seventies he adopted his Gikuyu name of Ngugi wa Thiong'o and vowed to write only in Gikuyu, his native language, viewing English as a means of "spiritual subjugation."

At the conference, Achebe read the manuscript of Ngugi's first novel, "Weep Not, Child," which he recommended to Heinemann for publication. The publisher soon asked him to sign on as general editor of its African Writers Series, a post he held, without pay, for ten years. Among the writers whose novels were published during his tenure were Flora Nwapa, John Munonye, and Ayi Kwei Armah-all of whom became important figures in the emerging African literature. Heinemann's Alan Hill later said that the "fantastic sales" of Achebe's books had supported the series. But the appeal of English was not purely commercial. A great novel, Achebe later argued, "alters the situation in the world." Igbo, Gikuyu, or Fante could not claim a global influence; English could.

Political imperatives were not hypothetical in Nigeria, which, having achieved independence in 1960, entered a prolonged period of upheaval. In 1967, following two coups that had led to genocidal violence against the Igbo, Igboland declared independence as the Republic of Biafra. Achebe himself became a target of the violence: his novel "A Man of the People" (1966), a political satire, had forecast the coup so accurately that some believed him to have been in on the plot. He devoted himself fully to the Biafran cause. For a time, he stopped writing fiction, taking up poetry-"something short, intense, more in keeping with my mood." Achebe travelled to London to promote awareness of the war, and in 1969 he helped write the official declaration of the "Principles of the Biafran Revolution."

But the fledgling nation starved, its roads and ports blockaded by the British-backed Nigerian Army. By the time Biafra was finally forced to surrender, in 1970, the number of Igbo dead was estimated at between one million and three million. At the height of the famine, Conor Cruise O'Brien reported in The New York Review of Books, five thousand to six thousand people-"mainly children"-died each day. The sufferers could be recognized by the distinctive signs of protein deficiency, known as kwashiorkor: bloated bellies, pale skin, and reddish hair. Achebe's poem "A Mother in a Refugee Camp" describes a woman's efforts to care for her child:

She took from their bundle of possessions
A broken comb and combed
The rust-colored hair left on his skull
And then-humming in her eyes-began carefully to part it.
In their former life this was perhaps
A little daily act of no consequence
Before his breakfast and school; now she did it
Like putting flowers on a tiny grave.

The heartbreak of Biafra shook the foundations of Nigerian society and led to decades of political turmoil. Achebe took the opportunity to distance himself temporarily, spending part of the early nineteen-seventies teaching in the United States. During these years, as the independence era's potential for brutality became clear, he set out to correct the colonial record with even greater vigor. In essays and lectures, he railed against what he called "colonialist criticism"-the conscious or unconscious dehumanization of African characters, the vision of the African writer as an "unfinished European who with patient guidance will grow up one day," the assumption that economic underdevelopment corresponds to a lack of intellectual sophistication ("Show me a people's plumbing, you say, and I can tell you their art"). He was infuriated to find how widespread these attitudes remained. One student, learning that Achebe taught African literature, remarked casually that "he never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff."

Achebe recounts this anecdote in "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' " (1977). Examining Conrad's descriptions of the "savages," Achebe shows that the novel, far from subverting imperialist constructions, falls victim to them. Marlow, the story's narrator, describes the Africans as "not inhuman," and continues, "Well, you know, that was the worst of it-this suspicion of their not being inhuman." And yet the blacks in the novel are nameless and faceless, their language barely more than grunts; they are assumed to be cannibals.The only explanation for this, Achebe concludes, is "obvious racism." Many have responded that Achebe oversimplifies Conrad's narrative: "Heart of Darkness" is a story within a story, told in the highly unreliable voice of Marlow, and the novel is, to say the least, ambivalent about imperialism. The writer Caryl Phillips has asked, "Is it not ridiculous to demand of Conrad that he imagine an African humanity that is totally out of line with both the times in which he was living and the larger purpose of his novel?" But, even if Conrad's methods can be justified, the significance of Achebe's essay was that justification now became necessary: he made the ugliness latent in Conrad's vision impossible to ignore.

In contrast to European modernism, with its embrace of "art for art's sake" (a concept that Achebe, with characteristic bluntness, once called "just another piece of deodorized dog shit"), Achebe has always advocated a socially and politically motivated literature. Since literature was complicit in colonialism, he says, let it also work to exorcise the ghosts of colonialism. "Literature is not a luxury for us. It is a life and death affair because we are fashioning a new man," he declared in a 1980 interview. His most recent novel, "Anthills of the Savannah" (1987), functions clearly in this mold, following a group of friends who serve in the government of the West African country of Kangan, obviously a stand-in for Nigeria. Sam, who took power in a coup, is steering the nation rapidly toward dictatorship. When Chris, the minister of information, refuses to take Sam's side against Ikem, the editor of the government-controlled newspaper, the full wrath of the government turns against both of them. The book does not match the artistic achievement of "Things Fall Apart" or "Arrow of God," but it gets to the heart of the corruption and the idealism of African politics.

Achebe insists that in its form and content the African novel must be an indigenous creation. This stance has led him to criticize other writers whom he regards as insufficiently politically committed, particularly Ayi Kwei Armah, whose novel "The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born" (1968) presents a dire vision of postcolonial Ghana. The novel begins with the image of a man sleeping on a bus with his eyes open. Streets and buildings are caked with garbage, phlegm, and excrement. Beneath the filthy surfaces, structures are rotten to the core. Armah's novel has been acclaimed as a vivid rendering of disillusionment with the country's new politics under Kwame Nkrumah. But Achebe finds Armah's "alienated stance" no better than Joyce Cary's, and particularly objects to Armah's existentialism, which he calls a "foreign metaphor" for the sickness of Ghana. Even worse, Armah has said that he is "not an African writer but just a writer," which Achebe calls "a statement of defeat."

Is it too utopian to imagine that the African novel could exist simply as a novel, absolved of its social and pedagogical mission? Achebe has been fiercely critical of those who search for "universality" in African fiction, arguing that such a standard is never applied to Western fiction. But there is something reductive about Achebe's insistence on defining writers by their ethnicity. To say that a work of literature transcends national boundaries is not to deny its moral or political value.

In 1990, Achebe was paralyzed after a serious car accident. Doctors advised him to come to the United States for treatment, and he has taught at Bard College ever since. "Home and Exile," a short collection of essays, is the only book he has published during this period, though he is said to be at work on a new novel. But, if Achebe is largely retired, another generation of writers has taken up his call for a new African literature, and the majority have followed his lead: they embrace the English language despite its colonial connotations, but they also seek to establish an African literary identity outside the colonial framework. And the achievements of African writers are increasingly recognized: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "Half of a Yellow Sun," an excruciating and remarkable novel about the Biafran war, won Britain's Orange Prize last year.

The "situation in the world," fifty years after "Things Fall Apart," is not as altered as one might wish. As Binyavanga Wainaina, the founding editor of the Kenyan literary magazine Kwani?, demonstrated in a satiric piece called "How to Write About Africa," racist stereotypes are still prevalent: "Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. . . . Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat." But the power of Achebe's legacy cannot be discounted. Adichie has recalled discovering his work at the age of about ten. Until then, she said, "I didn't think it was possible for people like me to be in books." ♦

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Chinua Achebe and the Great African Novel

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In a myth told by the Igbo people of Nigeria, men once decided to send a messenger to ask Chuku, the supreme god, if the dead could be permitted to come back to life. As their messenger, they chose a dog. But the dog delayed, and a toad, which had been eavesdropping, reached Chuku first.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/an-introduction-to-wide-sargasso-sea

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Literature Study Guides for all your favorite books! Get chapter summaries, in-depth analysis, and visual learning guides for hundreds of English Literary Classics.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad | Plot Summary

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.text
https://t.co/EM5S6FcbCM @Team_English1 I have put together 20 non-fiction texts exploring race, culture and identity. I have made 7 complete lessons focusing on the importance of language and language analysis. All extracts chosen are thought provoking. Use if you wish. :)

# data[].attributes.wish_content.attachment_props.original_text
https://t.co/EM5S6FcbCM @Team_English1 I have put together 20 non-fiction texts exploring race, culture and identity. I have made 7 complete lessons focusing on the importance of language and language analysis. All extracts chosen are thought provoking. Use if you wish. :)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.embed_code
https://t.co/EM5S6FcbCM @Team_English1 I have put together 20 non-fiction texts exploring race, culture and identity. I have made 7 complete lessons focusing on the importance of language and language analysis. All extracts chosen are thought provoking. Use if you wish. :)
— Rebecca Woodward (@Reeba_Wood) May 20, 2020

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
https://t.co/EM5S6FcbCM @Team_English1 I have put together 20 non-fiction texts exploring race, culture and identity. I have made 7 complete lessons focusing on the importance of language and language analysis. All extracts chosen are thought provoking. Use if you wish. :)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
https://t.co/EM5S6FcbCM @Team_English1 I have put together 20 non-fiction texts exploring race, culture and identity. I have made 7 complete lessons focusing on the importance of language and language analysis. All extracts chosen are thought provoking. Use if you wish. :)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
https://t.co/EM5S6FcbCM @Team_English1 I have put together 20 non-fiction texts exploring race, culture and identity. I have made 7 complete lessons focusing on the importance of language and language analysis. All extracts chosen are thought provoking. Use if you wish. :)