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Papers by John Wilson Paras

Inscribed in the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, and serving as context for the characters' upriv... more Inscribed in the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, and serving as context for the characters' upriver journey, is the history of an immense enterprise of cultural appropriation, a "fantastic invasion" 1 that drastically influenced the course of modernist aesthetics: namely, the expansion of narrative prose into the realm of poetry-a literary phenomenon tied, in Conrad's work, to late-nineteenth-century European colonialism. The ideological struggle between poetry and prose in Heart of Darkness affects thematic as well as formal structures of the novella, played out in the friction between lyric and narrative modes as well as in the tension between artistic and imperialist practices. Thus, Heart of Darkness offers a unique opportunity for gauging not only the aesthetic relations among genres, but also the interpenetrations of genre and history, of literature and social practices. Jean-Paul Sartre's pronouncement that prose is an attitude of mind applies equally well to poetry, and this essay begins with an analysis of the "poetic attitude" inscribed in Heart of Darkness-the set of working assumptions governing the text's posture toward poetic discourse. I offer an account of how poetry is figured and employed, how its traditional literary territory is invaded by the ambitious prose of the novella. I am interested not only in Conrad's implementation of poetic techniques such as repetition, rhythm, image and symbolic pattern to pioneer a modernist prose style, but also in the specific ways the categories poetry and prose are constituted as cultural categories in the uniquely Conradian, and in the generally modern, universe. It is not so much the technical or formal differences between verse and prose that are at issue here than the different practical functions assigned to each, what ideological purposes each serves within the particular historical context of late Victorian imperialism. The genre of poetry, in particular, is saturated with historically

Inscribed in the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, and serving as context for the characters' upriv... more Inscribed in the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, and serving as context for the characters' upriver journey, is the history of an immense enterprise of cultural appropriation, a "fantastic invasion" 1 that drastically influenced the course of modernist aesthetics: namely, the expansion of narrative prose into the realm of poetry-a literary phenomenon tied, in Conrad's work, to late-nineteenth-century European colonialism. The ideological struggle between poetry and prose in Heart of Darkness affects thematic as well as formal structures of the novella, played out in the friction between lyric and narrative modes as well as in the tension between artistic and imperialist practices. Thus, Heart of Darkness offers a unique opportunity for gauging not only the aesthetic relations among genres, but also the interpenetrations of genre and history, of literature and social practices. Jean-Paul Sartre's pronouncement that prose is an attitude of mind applies equally well to poetry, and this essay begins with an analysis of the "poetic attitude" inscribed in Heart of Darkness-the set of working assumptions governing the text's posture toward poetic discourse. I offer an account of how poetry is figured and employed, how its traditional literary territory is invaded by the ambitious prose of the novella. I am interested not only in Conrad's implementation of poetic techniques such as repetition, rhythm, image and symbolic pattern to pioneer a modernist prose style, but also in the specific ways the categories poetry and prose are constituted as cultural categories in the uniquely Conradian, and in the generally modern, universe. It is not so much the technical or formal differences between verse and prose that are at issue here than the different practical functions assigned to each, what ideological purposes each serves within the particular historical context of late Victorian imperialism. The genre of poetry, in particular, is saturated with historically