Russell Samolsky
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823234790
- eISBN:
- 9780823241248
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823234790.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter examines Heart of Darkness' apocalyptic drive to power by establishing a dialectic of “hollowing out” and “filling in” as the mechanisms by which the text incorporates the African ...
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This chapter examines Heart of Darkness' apocalyptic drive to power by establishing a dialectic of “hollowing out” and “filling in” as the mechanisms by which the text incorporates the African genocide into its textual field in a radical inflation of its technique of delayed decoding. It considers the Kurtz/Marlow pairing as the text's meditation on its future reception and performs the political intervention of setting a limit to the power of this text to consume mutilated bodies. Using Freud's analysis of the uncanny, the chapter turns the text's incorporation of African genocide back on itself, releasing an ethical counter-history. What the incorporated bodies now call up is the repressed memory of colonial genocide in the Congo, which is overwhelmed by its will to power over the Rwandan genocide. The chapter concludes by analyzing Heart of Darkness in relation to contemporary discourse on messianism.Less
This chapter examines Heart of Darkness' apocalyptic drive to power by establishing a dialectic of “hollowing out” and “filling in” as the mechanisms by which the text incorporates the African genocide into its textual field in a radical inflation of its technique of delayed decoding. It considers the Kurtz/Marlow pairing as the text's meditation on its future reception and performs the political intervention of setting a limit to the power of this text to consume mutilated bodies. Using Freud's analysis of the uncanny, the chapter turns the text's incorporation of African genocide back on itself, releasing an ethical counter-history. What the incorporated bodies now call up is the repressed memory of colonial genocide in the Congo, which is overwhelmed by its will to power over the Rwandan genocide. The chapter concludes by analyzing Heart of Darkness in relation to contemporary discourse on messianism.
Paul Wake
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074905
- eISBN:
- 9781781701256
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074905.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Questions surrounding the instant of death form the basis of this chapter which offers a reassessment of two influential readings of Heart of Darkness, those of Miller and Brooks. These readings are ...
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Questions surrounding the instant of death form the basis of this chapter which offers a reassessment of two influential readings of Heart of Darkness, those of Miller and Brooks. These readings are linked by a common recognition of the significance of death with regards to meaning, specifically, the death of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. The discussion approaches this case with reference to Heidegger's notion of Dasein as Being towards death and his formulation of death as the ‘possibility of impossibility’ both of which appear in Being and Time. It then critiques Miller and Brooks's readings in relation to Derrida's Aporias which examines the possibility of the experience that is denoted by the phrase ‘my death’ and which poses a radical challenge to Heidegger's notion of death.Less
Questions surrounding the instant of death form the basis of this chapter which offers a reassessment of two influential readings of Heart of Darkness, those of Miller and Brooks. These readings are linked by a common recognition of the significance of death with regards to meaning, specifically, the death of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. The discussion approaches this case with reference to Heidegger's notion of Dasein as Being towards death and his formulation of death as the ‘possibility of impossibility’ both of which appear in Being and Time. It then critiques Miller and Brooks's readings in relation to Derrida's Aporias which examines the possibility of the experience that is denoted by the phrase ‘my death’ and which poses a radical challenge to Heidegger's notion of death.
Jakob Lothe
- Published in print:
- 1991
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122555
- eISBN:
- 9780191671463
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122555.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
This chapter evaluates themes such as narrative success and narrative failure. This chapter is closely related to sophisticated modulations of the narrative method employed. In some of the tales by ...
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This chapter evaluates themes such as narrative success and narrative failure. This chapter is closely related to sophisticated modulations of the narrative method employed. In some of the tales by Joseph Conrad the relationship is more strained as in Chance where the narrative function of Marlow invites adverse commentary, or in Victory, where the thematic purpose of the heavy allegorizing seems unclear. In addition to the frame narrator, the most essential elements of the narrative method of ‘Heart of Darkness’ are constituted by Marlow's functions as narrator and character. There is a general danger attached to the narrative technique of interposing a simpler narrator between the reader and the text's major narrator: the views of the frame narrator may reduce or distort the complexity of the narrative he presents.Less
This chapter evaluates themes such as narrative success and narrative failure. This chapter is closely related to sophisticated modulations of the narrative method employed. In some of the tales by Joseph Conrad the relationship is more strained as in Chance where the narrative function of Marlow invites adverse commentary, or in Victory, where the thematic purpose of the heavy allegorizing seems unclear. In addition to the frame narrator, the most essential elements of the narrative method of ‘Heart of Darkness’ are constituted by Marlow's functions as narrator and character. There is a general danger attached to the narrative technique of interposing a simpler narrator between the reader and the text's major narrator: the views of the frame narrator may reduce or distort the complexity of the narrative he presents.
Richard Niland
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199580347
- eISBN:
- 9780191722738
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199580347.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
This chapter explores Conrad's literary style in the early years of his career, detailing how Conrad balanced his Polish literary and philosophical heritage with his new British cultural environment. ...
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This chapter explores Conrad's literary style in the early years of his career, detailing how Conrad balanced his Polish literary and philosophical heritage with his new British cultural environment. It investigates Conrad's early short stories and novels in the context of English neo-Hegelian philosophy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in the context of the work of F.H. Bradley. It also outlines Conrad's connection to Romantic and Victorian traditions of nineteenth century literature represented by William Hazlitt and Thomas Carlyle, examining Conrad's narrative and his representation of time and history up to and including Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. By focusing on Conrad's interest in various forms of historiography, from oral narratives to seminal Western historians such as Herodotus, the chapter places Conrad's early work in a variety of new historiographical contexts.Less
This chapter explores Conrad's literary style in the early years of his career, detailing how Conrad balanced his Polish literary and philosophical heritage with his new British cultural environment. It investigates Conrad's early short stories and novels in the context of English neo-Hegelian philosophy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in the context of the work of F.H. Bradley. It also outlines Conrad's connection to Romantic and Victorian traditions of nineteenth century literature represented by William Hazlitt and Thomas Carlyle, examining Conrad's narrative and his representation of time and history up to and including Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. By focusing on Conrad's interest in various forms of historiography, from oral narratives to seminal Western historians such as Herodotus, the chapter places Conrad's early work in a variety of new historiographical contexts.
Paul Wake
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074905
- eISBN:
- 9781781701256
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074905.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter draws on Genette's narrative theory in order to locate Marlow in the dual position of narrator and character through close readings of ‘Youth’ and Heart of Darkness, investigating the ...
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This chapter draws on Genette's narrative theory in order to locate Marlow in the dual position of narrator and character through close readings of ‘Youth’ and Heart of Darkness, investigating the idea that Conrad's narratives are structured around the transmission of story, and questioning the possibility of sustaining the distinction between that which is transmitted and the means of transmission. With this established, it reads Marlow's role as a narrator in the oral tradition alongside Benjamin's ‘The Storyteller’ in order to introduce a connection between narrative authority and death. The chapter concludes with a reading of ‘Youth’ in which the narrative frame becomes central to a reading of Marlow's ‘central’ story.Less
This chapter draws on Genette's narrative theory in order to locate Marlow in the dual position of narrator and character through close readings of ‘Youth’ and Heart of Darkness, investigating the idea that Conrad's narratives are structured around the transmission of story, and questioning the possibility of sustaining the distinction between that which is transmitted and the means of transmission. With this established, it reads Marlow's role as a narrator in the oral tradition alongside Benjamin's ‘The Storyteller’ in order to introduce a connection between narrative authority and death. The chapter concludes with a reading of ‘Youth’ in which the narrative frame becomes central to a reading of Marlow's ‘central’ story.
Stephen Clingman
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199278497
- eISBN:
- 9780191706981
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199278497.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Perhaps the reason Conrad's Heart of Darkness remains provocative for us is because we are still contained within its horizon. The chapter unlocks this question by considering Conrad in relation to ...
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Perhaps the reason Conrad's Heart of Darkness remains provocative for us is because we are still contained within its horizon. The chapter unlocks this question by considering Conrad in relation to issues of nationalism and the transnational, particularly in terms of his Polish upbringing and his decision to go to sea. It also considers him in relation to problems of narration, especially his need of a figure such as Marlow (‘no ordinary seaman’), in the light of Conrad's own massively troubling visit to the Congo. Other major Conrad texts are explored — Lord Jim, Nostromo — before the discussion returns to Heart of Darkness to consider its relation to Empire: a world without end or horizon, where the waterways of the earth both connect and divide. Conrad, who made the link between navigation and fiction emblematic, remains a haunting yet prescient figure for us today.Less
Perhaps the reason Conrad's Heart of Darkness remains provocative for us is because we are still contained within its horizon. The chapter unlocks this question by considering Conrad in relation to issues of nationalism and the transnational, particularly in terms of his Polish upbringing and his decision to go to sea. It also considers him in relation to problems of narration, especially his need of a figure such as Marlow (‘no ordinary seaman’), in the light of Conrad's own massively troubling visit to the Congo. Other major Conrad texts are explored — Lord Jim, Nostromo — before the discussion returns to Heart of Darkness to consider its relation to Empire: a world without end or horizon, where the waterways of the earth both connect and divide. Conrad, who made the link between navigation and fiction emblematic, remains a haunting yet prescient figure for us today.
John W. Griffith
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198183006
- eISBN:
- 9780191673931
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183006.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
This chapter explores concepts of tribe and detribalization. In the 19th century, the word ‘community’ in its German form — Gemeinschaft — began to take a peculiar anthropological meaning. This term ...
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This chapter explores concepts of tribe and detribalization. In the 19th century, the word ‘community’ in its German form — Gemeinschaft — began to take a peculiar anthropological meaning. This term referred to a community of intimate inter-relationships. Gemeinschaft contrasted sharply with Gesellschaft — the impersonal association of people as distinct individuals, especially in cities. These notions of cultural hermeticism and separateness often elided with nationalistic rhetoric in the Victorian era. Conrad often implied that Europe was not far removed from tribalism. Paradoxically, the imperialism at the centre of Heart of Darkness is portrayed as a form of only slightly elevated tribalism, while at the same time, it is viewed as destructive of the tribal integrity of African cultures.Less
This chapter explores concepts of tribe and detribalization. In the 19th century, the word ‘community’ in its German form — Gemeinschaft — began to take a peculiar anthropological meaning. This term referred to a community of intimate inter-relationships. Gemeinschaft contrasted sharply with Gesellschaft — the impersonal association of people as distinct individuals, especially in cities. These notions of cultural hermeticism and separateness often elided with nationalistic rhetoric in the Victorian era. Conrad often implied that Europe was not far removed from tribalism. Paradoxically, the imperialism at the centre of Heart of Darkness is portrayed as a form of only slightly elevated tribalism, while at the same time, it is viewed as destructive of the tribal integrity of African cultures.
Jon Hegglund
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199796106
- eISBN:
- 9780199932771
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199796106.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, World Literature
This chapter explores literary and cultural representations of the continent as an alternative to a world-system of nation-states. It looks at texts by Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, each of which ...
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This chapter explores literary and cultural representations of the continent as an alternative to a world-system of nation-states. It looks at texts by Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, each of which imagines the continent as a countermyth to the territorial nation-state. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad, drawing on theories of geographical determinism, shows Africa as a space able to undo centuries of European acculturation through its primeval landscapes and hostile climate. Nearly four decades later, Graham Greene's 1936 travel narrative Journeys Without Maps imagines the continent of Africa as a dystopian symptom of a European modernity gone global, and the sovereignty of Liberia—only one of two non-colonized nation-states—points not toward future decolonization and indigenous self-determination but rather toward a debased, failed imitation of the European national idea. In contrast to these mournful European visions, the chapter reads a series of documents authored by King Njoya of Bamum (in contemporary Cameroon), including an early twentieth-century map of his kingdom, which projects a geography that draws from both an imaginative compromise between Western notions of territoriality and indigenous spatial practices based upon the historical lineage of tribal community.Less
This chapter explores literary and cultural representations of the continent as an alternative to a world-system of nation-states. It looks at texts by Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, each of which imagines the continent as a countermyth to the territorial nation-state. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad, drawing on theories of geographical determinism, shows Africa as a space able to undo centuries of European acculturation through its primeval landscapes and hostile climate. Nearly four decades later, Graham Greene's 1936 travel narrative Journeys Without Maps imagines the continent of Africa as a dystopian symptom of a European modernity gone global, and the sovereignty of Liberia—only one of two non-colonized nation-states—points not toward future decolonization and indigenous self-determination but rather toward a debased, failed imitation of the European national idea. In contrast to these mournful European visions, the chapter reads a series of documents authored by King Njoya of Bamum (in contemporary Cameroon), including an early twentieth-century map of his kingdom, which projects a geography that draws from both an imaginative compromise between Western notions of territoriality and indigenous spatial practices based upon the historical lineage of tribal community.
Howard Felperin
- Published in print:
- 1992
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122654
- eISBN:
- 9780191671517
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122654.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
The recent quickening of interest in Shakespearean, Spenserian, and medieval romance may be seen as part of a broader movement within modern criticism, ...
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The recent quickening of interest in Shakespearean, Spenserian, and medieval romance may be seen as part of a broader movement within modern criticism, an attempt to re-discover the roots of our literary consciousness in the deeper structures of fantasy, play, and dreaming that we are all, so to speak, born into. Is it not precisely the untroubled sublimity of the native tradition of high romance inscribed in the works of William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton that conditions a crisis of anxiety for the post-Renaissance poets who endeavour to revive that tradition and bring forth their own second nature? Students of Romanticism have tended to regard the romance literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance as a well-travelled world, the large historical and structural contours of which are familiar and safe. This chapter considers the work of Northrop Frye and explains the demystification and remystification of the romance mode in The Tempest and Heart of Darkness.Less
The recent quickening of interest in Shakespearean, Spenserian, and medieval romance may be seen as part of a broader movement within modern criticism, an attempt to re-discover the roots of our literary consciousness in the deeper structures of fantasy, play, and dreaming that we are all, so to speak, born into. Is it not precisely the untroubled sublimity of the native tradition of high romance inscribed in the works of William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton that conditions a crisis of anxiety for the post-Renaissance poets who endeavour to revive that tradition and bring forth their own second nature? Students of Romanticism have tended to regard the romance literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance as a well-travelled world, the large historical and structural contours of which are familiar and safe. This chapter considers the work of Northrop Frye and explains the demystification and remystification of the romance mode in The Tempest and Heart of Darkness.
Con Coroneos
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198187363
- eISBN:
- 9780191674716
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198187363.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
This chapter examines the so-called enucleation in the fiction of Joseph Conrad. It suggests that the double meaning of enucleation which caused tension in literary modernism was accurately expressed ...
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This chapter examines the so-called enucleation in the fiction of Joseph Conrad. It suggests that the double meaning of enucleation which caused tension in literary modernism was accurately expressed in Conrad's Heart of Darkness where the narrative method directs the reader to the possibility of a writing in which meaning in not inside like a kernel but outside enveloping the tale which brought it out. Another example of this was his The Secret Agent where the narrative can either be considered an imaginative shortcoming or wilful effect.Less
This chapter examines the so-called enucleation in the fiction of Joseph Conrad. It suggests that the double meaning of enucleation which caused tension in literary modernism was accurately expressed in Conrad's Heart of Darkness where the narrative method directs the reader to the possibility of a writing in which meaning in not inside like a kernel but outside enveloping the tale which brought it out. Another example of this was his The Secret Agent where the narrative can either be considered an imaginative shortcoming or wilful effect.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter discusses the taxonomy of imaginary literary works (supplementing the taxonomy of fictionalized life‐writings proposed in Chapter 5), and their scarcity during the nineteenth century. It ...
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This chapter discusses the taxonomy of imaginary literary works (supplementing the taxonomy of fictionalized life‐writings proposed in Chapter 5), and their scarcity during the nineteenth century. It concludes the discussion of Joyce, and ends with an account of Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as an indisputable example of a fictionally authored auto/biography.Less
This chapter discusses the taxonomy of imaginary literary works (supplementing the taxonomy of fictionalized life‐writings proposed in Chapter 5), and their scarcity during the nineteenth century. It concludes the discussion of Joyce, and ends with an account of Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as an indisputable example of a fictionally authored auto/biography.
Alison Garden
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781789621815
- eISBN:
- 9781800341678
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Discontinued
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789621815.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The relationship between Casement and Conrad has long fascinated many, with W.G. Sebald fictionalising their meeting in The Rings of Saturn (1998) as part of the text’s engagement with Conrad’s ...
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The relationship between Casement and Conrad has long fascinated many, with W.G. Sebald fictionalising their meeting in The Rings of Saturn (1998) as part of the text’s engagement with Conrad’s novella and archival trail. For Sebald, Casement galvanises a set of interlinked preoccupations: the catastrophes of modernity, state-sponsored violence, the fragility of memory and the unavoidable spectre of history. Tracing the dialogue between these two works - embodied by Casement’s ghost - enables us to read the metamodernist aesthetics of Sebald as a form of ghostly intertextual memory, indicative of the post-imperial debris that continues to haunt our contemporary moment. Reading Heart of Darkness through The Rings of Saturn opens up both texts in enabling, fruitful ways; just as reading Casement through Conrad’s archive provides us with novel ways of reading the two men and Conrad’s work.Less
The relationship between Casement and Conrad has long fascinated many, with W.G. Sebald fictionalising their meeting in The Rings of Saturn (1998) as part of the text’s engagement with Conrad’s novella and archival trail. For Sebald, Casement galvanises a set of interlinked preoccupations: the catastrophes of modernity, state-sponsored violence, the fragility of memory and the unavoidable spectre of history. Tracing the dialogue between these two works - embodied by Casement’s ghost - enables us to read the metamodernist aesthetics of Sebald as a form of ghostly intertextual memory, indicative of the post-imperial debris that continues to haunt our contemporary moment. Reading Heart of Darkness through The Rings of Saturn opens up both texts in enabling, fruitful ways; just as reading Casement through Conrad’s archive provides us with novel ways of reading the two men and Conrad’s work.
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846311956
- eISBN:
- 9781846315220
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846315220.003
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
Chapter 1 showed how narrative irony was used by postcolonial writers to distance themselves from colonial narratives. This chapter discusses a particular strand of this irony, directed against ...
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Chapter 1 showed how narrative irony was used by postcolonial writers to distance themselves from colonial narratives. This chapter discusses a particular strand of this irony, directed against imperial stereotypes of the jungle as a space of the sublime, of horror and of unknowability. Through parody, the novela de la selva transforms these colonial tropes into empowering concepts, presenting a vision of the jungle as an enormous heart of voracious vegetation and lurking evil, ready to engulf the unwary traveller. The chapter also examines the dystopian representation of the rainforest throughout the novela de la selva, with reference to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The latter anticipates the South American authors' efforts to forge a new aesthetics of nature — a descriptive vocabulary which, far from attempting to humanize the telluric, emphasizes the radical disjunction between man and tropical nature, and holds up the mysterious and often terrifying jungle flora as a direct challenge to European landscape aesthetics.Less
Chapter 1 showed how narrative irony was used by postcolonial writers to distance themselves from colonial narratives. This chapter discusses a particular strand of this irony, directed against imperial stereotypes of the jungle as a space of the sublime, of horror and of unknowability. Through parody, the novela de la selva transforms these colonial tropes into empowering concepts, presenting a vision of the jungle as an enormous heart of voracious vegetation and lurking evil, ready to engulf the unwary traveller. The chapter also examines the dystopian representation of the rainforest throughout the novela de la selva, with reference to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The latter anticipates the South American authors' efforts to forge a new aesthetics of nature — a descriptive vocabulary which, far from attempting to humanize the telluric, emphasizes the radical disjunction between man and tropical nature, and holds up the mysterious and often terrifying jungle flora as a direct challenge to European landscape aesthetics.
Laura Chrisman
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719058271
- eISBN:
- 9781781700136
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719058271.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, Imperialism and Colonialism
This chapter outlines some of the ways in which late nineteenth-century European imperialism inheres in the textures of daily labour and leisure in Conrad's novella, suggesting that the Company's ...
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This chapter outlines some of the ways in which late nineteenth-century European imperialism inheres in the textures of daily labour and leisure in Conrad's novella, suggesting that the Company's structures and agents, including Kurtz, need to be reinterpreted through this imperial metropolitan perspective. Ultimately, what animates and controls the Company and Kurtz are urban corporate power, public opinion and consumption. The chapter proposes the reading of Heart of Darkness as a path-clearing exercise for future critical and theoretical analyses of metropolitan imperialism. It justifies this modest activity on the grounds that it is precisely, and only, through close reading that the full import of the interplay of the metropolis and imperialism can be traced. The challenge Conrad's novella sets is to decasualize imperialism, expose its banality and recentre the metropole as its primary agent.Less
This chapter outlines some of the ways in which late nineteenth-century European imperialism inheres in the textures of daily labour and leisure in Conrad's novella, suggesting that the Company's structures and agents, including Kurtz, need to be reinterpreted through this imperial metropolitan perspective. Ultimately, what animates and controls the Company and Kurtz are urban corporate power, public opinion and consumption. The chapter proposes the reading of Heart of Darkness as a path-clearing exercise for future critical and theoretical analyses of metropolitan imperialism. It justifies this modest activity on the grounds that it is precisely, and only, through close reading that the full import of the interplay of the metropolis and imperialism can be traced. The challenge Conrad's novella sets is to decasualize imperialism, expose its banality and recentre the metropole as its primary agent.
Linda Dryden
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748637744
- eISBN:
- 9780748652143
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748637744.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter considers Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad as writers whose imperial fictions voiced attitudes towards adventure and encounters that are at odds with much of the literature of ...
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This chapter considers Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad as writers whose imperial fictions voiced attitudes towards adventure and encounters that are at odds with much of the literature of empire that went before and with the romance and adventure genre of the likes of Rider Haggard. It also argues that Stevenson should be regarded as an imperial sceptic whose fictions prepared the way for the bleak vision of empire that Conrad espoused. The Ebb-Tide is a tale of imperial misadventure in which three ne'er-do-wells stumble upon a self-aggrandising imperial despot on a remote Pacific island. Conrad's break with the imperial romance tradition finds clear expression in his earliest work, but with Heart of Darkness his modernist sensibilities become devastatingly apparent as they coincide with his critique of imperialism. Stevenson had commenced the task of unravelling the misconceptions about empire while Conrad was simultaneously working on the same project.Less
This chapter considers Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad as writers whose imperial fictions voiced attitudes towards adventure and encounters that are at odds with much of the literature of empire that went before and with the romance and adventure genre of the likes of Rider Haggard. It also argues that Stevenson should be regarded as an imperial sceptic whose fictions prepared the way for the bleak vision of empire that Conrad espoused. The Ebb-Tide is a tale of imperial misadventure in which three ne'er-do-wells stumble upon a self-aggrandising imperial despot on a remote Pacific island. Conrad's break with the imperial romance tradition finds clear expression in his earliest work, but with Heart of Darkness his modernist sensibilities become devastatingly apparent as they coincide with his critique of imperialism. Stevenson had commenced the task of unravelling the misconceptions about empire while Conrad was simultaneously working on the same project.
Robert Eaglestone
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- June 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198778363
- eISBN:
- 9780191823800
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198778363.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, World Literature
How far is it possible to bring together the scholarly insights of postcolonialism and Holocaust and genocide literature? The aim is not to subsume either but to place them together into a dialogue ...
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How far is it possible to bring together the scholarly insights of postcolonialism and Holocaust and genocide literature? The aim is not to subsume either but to place them together into a dialogue to explore the literary subjectivity of the ‘disoriented’. To explore this idea, the chapter reads Joseph Conrad’s canonical novella Heart of Darkness as a text by a low-level perpetrator of a colonial genocide, and argues that this illuminates some of its celebrated and famously obscure characteristics, especially those of complicity and secrecy, as well as making some very counter-intuitive suggestions about the role of Kurtz.Less
How far is it possible to bring together the scholarly insights of postcolonialism and Holocaust and genocide literature? The aim is not to subsume either but to place them together into a dialogue to explore the literary subjectivity of the ‘disoriented’. To explore this idea, the chapter reads Joseph Conrad’s canonical novella Heart of Darkness as a text by a low-level perpetrator of a colonial genocide, and argues that this illuminates some of its celebrated and famously obscure characteristics, especially those of complicity and secrecy, as well as making some very counter-intuitive suggestions about the role of Kurtz.
Laura Chrisman
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719058271
- eISBN:
- 9781781700136
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719058271.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Imperialism and Colonialism
This book analyses black Atlantic studies, colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory, providing paradigms for understanding imperial literature, Englishness and black transnationalism. Its ...
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This book analyses black Atlantic studies, colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory, providing paradigms for understanding imperial literature, Englishness and black transnationalism. Its concerns range from the metropolitan centre of Conrad's Heart of Darkness to fatherhood in Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk; from the marketing of South African literature to cosmopolitanism in Achebe; and from utopian discourse in Parry to Jameson's theorisation of empire.Less
This book analyses black Atlantic studies, colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory, providing paradigms for understanding imperial literature, Englishness and black transnationalism. Its concerns range from the metropolitan centre of Conrad's Heart of Darkness to fatherhood in Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk; from the marketing of South African literature to cosmopolitanism in Achebe; and from utopian discourse in Parry to Jameson's theorisation of empire.
David Trotter
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198850472
- eISBN:
- 9780191885587
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198850472.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter demonstrates that the question of the interface as a cultural form arose most productively during the nineteenth century in the context of technologies relating to sea rather than land. ...
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This chapter demonstrates that the question of the interface as a cultural form arose most productively during the nineteenth century in the context of technologies relating to sea rather than land. The ‘system’ or ‘medium’ at issue was that of the crew and material apparatus of a sailing ship: the ship’s captain gained access to it by means of the quarterdeck, and the ‘digital command’ (Rachel Plotnick) the quarterdeck affords. The question of the interface arises in Joseph Conrad’s most notable sea tales: ‘The Secret Sharer’ and The Shadow-Line. The chapter provides an analysis of these tales, and of Heart of Darkness, in which a sea captain ventures upriver on a steamboat. Marlow’s demonstrable if anguished mastery of his ship-medium can be understood as an attempt to repair and extend the connectivity that sustains empire. Conrad examines the political and moral cost of assuming that the medium is the message.Less
This chapter demonstrates that the question of the interface as a cultural form arose most productively during the nineteenth century in the context of technologies relating to sea rather than land. The ‘system’ or ‘medium’ at issue was that of the crew and material apparatus of a sailing ship: the ship’s captain gained access to it by means of the quarterdeck, and the ‘digital command’ (Rachel Plotnick) the quarterdeck affords. The question of the interface arises in Joseph Conrad’s most notable sea tales: ‘The Secret Sharer’ and The Shadow-Line. The chapter provides an analysis of these tales, and of Heart of Darkness, in which a sea captain ventures upriver on a steamboat. Marlow’s demonstrable if anguished mastery of his ship-medium can be understood as an attempt to repair and extend the connectivity that sustains empire. Conrad examines the political and moral cost of assuming that the medium is the message.
Yael Levin
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198864370
- eISBN:
- 9780191896538
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198864370.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The chapter focuses on Conrad’s scenes of suspension as sites for an investigation of language and its role in the creation of the modernist subject. Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Victory are read ...
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The chapter focuses on Conrad’s scenes of suspension as sites for an investigation of language and its role in the creation of the modernist subject. Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Victory are read as the serial restaging of an unsolicited encounter with the language of the other. These unwarranted interruptions contribute to an exploration of a particularly passive and fragmented subjectivity that relinquishes the agency and cohesion afforded the Cartesian cogito. The insistence on the oral tradition is thus read not as an attempt to resurrect speech within an essentially silent medium but as a dramatization of the role of language in the evolution of the modernist subject and the narrative that houses him. Those same experimental narrative techniques that are often associated with Conrad’s commitment to an inherently epistemological philosophical inquiry are attributed here to the author’s effort to chart the ontological coordinates of character and narration.Less
The chapter focuses on Conrad’s scenes of suspension as sites for an investigation of language and its role in the creation of the modernist subject. Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Victory are read as the serial restaging of an unsolicited encounter with the language of the other. These unwarranted interruptions contribute to an exploration of a particularly passive and fragmented subjectivity that relinquishes the agency and cohesion afforded the Cartesian cogito. The insistence on the oral tradition is thus read not as an attempt to resurrect speech within an essentially silent medium but as a dramatization of the role of language in the evolution of the modernist subject and the narrative that houses him. Those same experimental narrative techniques that are often associated with Conrad’s commitment to an inherently epistemological philosophical inquiry are attributed here to the author’s effort to chart the ontological coordinates of character and narration.
K. M. Newton
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748636730
- eISBN:
- 9780748652082
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748636730.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter describes the works of tragic writers, such as Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy and Joseph Conrad. Features of Hardy's tragic perspective that reflects the impact of Darwinism are elaborated. ...
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This chapter describes the works of tragic writers, such as Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy and Joseph Conrad. Features of Hardy's tragic perspective that reflects the impact of Darwinism are elaborated. George Eliot was interested in the tragic and tragedy as a form both critically and philosophically and discussed them in several essays. Eliot is less willing than Hardy to give the tragic the last word. The tragic in Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure is also addressed. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina has often been called a tragic novel, though ‘tragic’ tends to be used in a rather general sense. Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a ferocious exposure of colonialism and imperialism, at least as practised by non-British colonialists. Conrad can be compared to Tolstoy since both resist the tragic.Less
This chapter describes the works of tragic writers, such as Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy and Joseph Conrad. Features of Hardy's tragic perspective that reflects the impact of Darwinism are elaborated. George Eliot was interested in the tragic and tragedy as a form both critically and philosophically and discussed them in several essays. Eliot is less willing than Hardy to give the tragic the last word. The tragic in Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure is also addressed. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina has often been called a tragic novel, though ‘tragic’ tends to be used in a rather general sense. Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a ferocious exposure of colonialism and imperialism, at least as practised by non-British colonialists. Conrad can be compared to Tolstoy since both resist the tragic.
