JOSEPH CONRAD: A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION (original) (raw)
Related papers
Psychoanalytic reading of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the Freudian Pespective
Geographical discoveries and economic developments from the sixteenth to nineteenth and to the early half of twentieth centuries deeply influenced to every field of life from the politic to the literature, cultures and the lifestyles of people. The geographical discoveries and the need of imperial powers for the markets changed the balance. As the results of changes during the 16 th century, some governments such as Portugal, Russia, France and England became the great powers of the world in terms of colonialism and imperialism. Besides discovering new lands and markets they also advanced technologically that enabled them to dominate over their colonies.
Twenty-First Century Conrad Studies
Studies in the Novel, 2007
Is Joseph Conrad a political fatalist? Is he an existentialist? Or, does his work offer political hope? The paradox of contemporary Conrad scholarship is that Conrad's extremely dark and near fatalistic literature has inspired many political activists. I briefly survey contemporary Conrad criticism in order to clarify the logic of this approach to Conrad.
A Study on Free Will: Who Sees What in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes?
Gaziantep University Journal of Social Sciences, 2019
The aim of this paper is to explore the art of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) as an impressionist writer by focusing on one of his novels, Under Western Eyes (1911) as a psychological novel. In order to understand Conrad's motives and style to write this novel, one should start with a sound beginning by looking at his concept of narrative fiction and recurring themes in the novel. The points that are highlighted in the paper are the concept of betrayal and its reasons and results for the characters, and the absence of a father as a driving force. Also, such philosophical issues and questions as 'who sees what?', seeing versus understanding and the impossibility of free will be explored in this article. This study argues that Joseph Conrad as a novelist uses impressionism as a tool to capture and convey the psychological principles concerning human consciousness in the aforementioned novel; in this sense, this article is also an attempt to contribute to the scholarship on Conrad's narrative fiction.
The Production of the Imperialist Subjectivities in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”
International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature
In this paper, I argue that Joseph Conrad portrays the imperialist ideology as fundamentally flawed in “Heart of Darkness". The inconsistency of imperialism is blatantly evident in the contradiction between the perceptions of Kurtz as “an emissary of pity” (59) and his call for genocide, which he put as a postscript in his report to the Society for the Suppression of the Savage Customs. I thus claim that “Heart of Darkness” constructs the colonizer as a flawed subject who suffers from the same contradictions with the imperialist system as its product. I will use the Lacanian theory of the symbolic order and refer to Slavoj Žižek’s re-formulations of it in order to substantiate and clarify my points.
Yearbook of Conrad Studies
The eponymous question of the present address as well as its main premise concern the issue of reading Conrad as opposed to the issue of Conrad's readings. Although the writer insisted on the priority of artistic expression in his oeuvres over their thematic content, he tends to be analyzed with a view to precedence of content over form. Moreover, his application in his less known short fiction of the then novel modernist device of denegation usually ascribed to Faulkner, is hardly given its due in criticism. What distorts Conrad is, likewise, ideological mediatization of his fiction and biography. And, last but not least, comes insufficient appreciation among Western Conradians of the significance for his writings of his Polish background, and especially his borderland szlachta heritage, where also Polish criticism has been at fault. As emphasized, in comparison with Conrad's Englishness, which comes down to the added value of his home, family, friends, and career in England as well as the adopted language, his Polishness is about l'âme: the patriotic spirit of Conrad's ancestry, traumatic childhood experience, Polish upbringing and education, sensibilities and deeply felt loyalties deriving from his formative years in Poland. Therefore, one of the premises put forward in the present address is that perhaps Conrad should be referred to as an English writer with his Polish identity constantly inscribed and reinscribed into the content and form of his oeuvres, rather than simply an English writer of Polish descent as he is now. The three eponymous aspects are thus hardly to be ignored in Conrad studies, even if a significant part of Conrad criticism to date has done precisely that. 1
Cultural aspects of Joseph Conrad´s autobiography. On the digressive structure of Some Reminiscences
Yearbook of Conrad Studies, 2013
In this essay I attempt to analyse Joseph Conrad's 'autobiography'-as it is presented in Some Reminiscences-with particular reference to the enduring cultural patterns that it exhibits. According to the confi gurationist or "culture and personality" approach elaborated by American anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict and Ralph Linton, patterns of behaviour transmitted within particular cultural groups permanently confi gure the personality model of its members both at the level of everyday behaviour and at the level of ideal patterns. This is confi rmed by an analysis of Conrad's autobiography, in which the writer draws on the ideal patterns of the culture of the Polish eastern borderlands (which he acquired during the process of socialization)-not only in order to analyse his own personality, but also to govern his behaviour in completely different cultural contexts. Even more interestingly, these behavioural patterns have confi gured the particular model of the world that is refl ected in the very structure of Conrad's works. In this connection the infl uence of the gawęda or 'Polish nobleman's tale' would seem to be indisputable. It is not so much that Conrad alludes to this literary convention in his autobiographical reminiscences, but rather that he uses it to recreate the model (based on cultural patterns) of the imagination of a Polish nobleman from the eastern borderlands. Moreover, this culturally determined writing strategy is used in Conrad's other works.
Representations of the other in selected works of Joseph Conrad
2018
This thesis examines how Otherness/ alterity is represented in Joseph Conrad’s writing through an exploration of a selection of three of his works, namely The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, Lord Jim, and Under Western Eyes. Drawing on notions of alterity and the Other as espoused in postcolonial discourse (which is subsumed under poststructuralism and postmodernism), it sets out to demonstrate that, in his writing, Joseph Conrad deploys of a formulaic technique of Othering that could be traced, to a greater of lesser degree, across all his writing. It proceeds from the premise that Conrad’s writing engages with an abiding concern with the individual’s construction of an identity in relation to his society. From this perspective, it investigates issues of race and culture as they relate to identity within the contested terrain of social space. Drawing on theories of identity and representation propounded by Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Stuart Hall, and reading these in tandem with Edwar...