Colonial attitudes towards Africa

Reading Reflection 1
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)
Your reading reflection should be 2.0-3.0 pages in length (double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12-point font with 1-inch margins on all sides). These reflections can take a variety of forms – the one thing that they cannot be is a summary of the text. Your reading reflection can discuss analytical concepts, consider key questions, or discuss issues regarding the assignment. Some examples of topics you might focus on include:
The theme of savagery/primitiveness in the novel
The motif of darkness in both the book’s title and as a symbol throughout the text
Colonial attitudes towards Africa
Discuss the book through the arguments presented in Achebe’s article, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”
These are just a few examples of how you can approach this assignment and you should feel confident in exploring any theme/idea from the text that jumps out at you. I do not have a set idea of what I am looking for; I want to see your thought process and how you can link this text to the themes of the course.
On the issue of supporting information, it is very important that you use citations to mark where your supporting evidence comes from. For these papers, I want you to use footnotes for the information you pull from the book (you do not need to cite my lectures). You do not need to use full footnote citations: instead, your footnotes should look like the example below.
Conrad (year of publication), p. x
You can use whichever citation style you are most comfortable with. Your citations must be consistent but they do not need to follow a specific style.
You do not need to include a Works Cited page, because there are should be no outside sources used for these papers. Your only sources of information for this paper are Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, possibly Achebe’s critique of the text, and lecture materials.

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