Achebe's Things Fall Apart is text for 2005 student reading project

By Franklin Crawford

Nigerian author Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart will be required reading for more than 3,000 incoming freshman and transfer students this fall. The selection of Achebe's masterpiece as the text for the annual 2005 New Student Reading Project -- now in its fifth year -- was announced earlier this week by Isaac Kramnick, vice provost for undergraduate education.

"For several years we've wanted to use a non-Western text for the annual project," said Kramnick. "Achebe's piece is a classic of world literature.

"While it is a non-Western text rooted in the particularity of a tribal culture of Nigeria in the 1890s, it reaches for the universal human condition," he said.

Things Fall Apart was written in 1958 and depicts the rise and fall of Okonkwo, a Nigerian "whose sense of manliness is more akin to that of his warrior ancestors than to that of his fellow clansmen who have converted to Christianity and are appeasing the British administrators who infiltrate their village," according to The Library Journal. Determined not to repeat the mistakes of his idle, debt-ridden father, the stern, hardworking Okonkwo is at once "a quintessential old-order Nigerian and a universal character in whom sons of all races have identified as the figure of their father."

This year, in addition to the Cornell project's annual Barton Hall panel and small group discussions, more than 4,000 advanced-placement high school students across New York state also will read Things Fall Apart. That effort, a pilot project, is being organized with help from Cornell Cooperative Extension offices in 16 New York counties, Kramnick said.

"The pilot project is an expression of Cornell's land grant mission and its obligation to the intellectual enhancement of the people of this state," he said. "And the selection of Achebe's book is appropriate to President Lehman's desire that Cornell undergraduates explore and understand the realms of other cultures, as is befitting to an education at a transnational university," he said.