Open Doors Scholarship Essay Template

1. Paragraph 1 (The Intellectual Goal): Two years of reading African postcolonial fiction against theoretical frameworks that were built without it in mind, to find where those frameworks hold and where they simply do not fit.

2. Paragraph 2 (What inspired the goal): Teaching "Things Fall Apart" to sixteen-year-olds every year, and not being able to answer why Okonkwo's fall is being read through the same tragic hero framework as Macbeth's.

1. Paragraph 1 (The Teaching and What Grew From It): Four years teaching literature at Greenfield College, including two years running an after-school reading circle that grew from five students to nineteen, reading writers outside the syllabus. A student essay anthology printed forty copies and sold out within a term at two other schools.

2. Paragraph 2 (The Work Outside the Classroom Walls): Six months as a part-time reader for a Lagos-based publisher, writing reader reports on unsolicited manuscripts, which taught more about how criticism functions in practice than three years of undergraduate theory.

1. Paragraph 1 (The Moment): A student, Tobi, wrote an essay arguing Okonkwo isn't a tragic hero in the Aristotelian sense because tragedy assumes a fall from a height the culture recognizes, and Umuofia doesn't measure a man's worth the way a Greek city-state does. The grade on the exam rubric was wrong. The argument was right.

2. Paragraph 2 (The Desire): The essay was kept rather than filed away, and the unresolved question of what to do with a sixteen-year-old catching something the assigned criticism hadn't.

1. Paragraph 1 (Where the Tools Came From): Russian formalism, Shklovsky, Propp, and the tradition of asking what a text is doing mechanically before asking what it means, as the actual source of the tools used to read structure, versus the two-paragraph summary version most African literature courses give it.

2. Paragraph 2 (What's Actually There): HSE's comparative literature scholars taking non-European texts seriously as objects of formal analysis rather than only sociological evidence, and reading Achebe from outside the Anglo-American critical establishment, in a country with its own separate argument about literature and empire.