Review of Conrad, Faulkner, and the Problem of Nonsense by Anne Luyat (original) (raw)
Related papers
Pei-Wen Clio’s review of The Problem of Nonsense in Joseph Conrad Today Book Review 81
Joseph Conrad Today, 2019
Ebileeni restates the significance of choosing Conrad’s and Faulkner’s novels to demonstrate the living situation of uncertainty at the turn of the century due to “cultural and scientific transformations” (127). The two writers’ experimental narrative techniques were a way to respond to the possibility of chaos and explore the “dimen- sions of survival” (127). The key difference between them is that Conrad adopts cynicism in thematic terms while Faulkner moves beyond that in both thematic and linguistic levels to deal with the permeating chaos. In the face of the disintegration of “an absolute, transcendental authority,” Ebileeni tersely concludes The Problem of Nonsense by maintaining that Conrad “endures” the universal chaos, while Faulkner “prevails” in the chaotic universal structure “by means of nonsense."
JOSEPH CONRAD: A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
Joseph Conrad has been an eminent author of the modern times and his colonial writings do present a critique of the hypocritical nature of European imperialism. Many of his works are highly impressionistic in nature because of their graphic, physical representations of not only the physical landscapes of the colonized world but also the cultural ethos of the different people of those lands. But at the same time, it must not be forgotten that Conrad does probe into the inmost recesses of the characters of his works and make a thorough investigation into the abounding complexities of the human mind. In other words, Conrad‘s works are also psychological treatises where one can trace his insightful probe into the various complex processes that underlie the intricate workings of the human mind.
A man in crisis: selected short fiction of Joseph Conrad
Ars Aeterna, 2015
Joseph Conrad devoted twenty years to the writing of short stories. The wide range of subject and setting, spanning from sea stories to domestic tales, managed to constitute Conrad’s reputation as a master story-teller capable of capturing his audience with any theme. While the stories vary in quality, length and themes explored, they all oscillate around the subject of human psyche, with its unpredictability and dark corners portrayed in a rather complex way. The paper seeks to explore the vision of humanity, emerging from Conrad’s short fiction, as well as the literary devices which enable him to capture the essence of human struggle. It focuses primarily on Conrad’s extensive use of figurative language, which contributes to the lyrical quality of his texts, and enables him to express the anguish and disintegration of his characters.
La Folie Almayer: Madness in Conrad and René Magritte
SHARE PUB DATE: September 2019 ISBN: 9788322791868 272 pages FORMATSome Intertextual Chords of Joseph Conrad’s Literary Art Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives Series. Vol.28 (2019), 2019
By thinking the possible relationship between Conrad’s first novel and Magritte’s philosophical painting, La Folie Almayer, this paper aims to reassess the meaning of the folly in Conrad’s first novel less in terms of a foolish act of an individual person than in terms of a decision of reconciliation between the Arabs and the Europeans, or what Jacques Derrida calls a moment of madness (folie) that must move beyond rationality and calculative reasoning. René Magritte’s 1951 painting borrows its title from Conrad’s first novel Almayer’s Folly, based on a suggestion made by his surrealist poet friend. The image of the ruined tower and the uprooted tree in Magritte’s La folie Almayer is evocative of a grand mansion built by Almayer who dreamt of a splendid future and a scene from the beginning of Conrad’s novel in which the protagonist stands on the veranda of his decaying house and looks at uprooted trees carried away to the ocean by torrents of muddy water while meditating on his past failure. Similar representations of towers can be found in other works executed by the artist prior to La folie Almayer, and Conrad and Magritte, as this paper hopes to demonstrate, have lots in common in elusiveness and in their obsession with madness all through their lives. Francophone Conrad might have imagined Almayer’s ‘folly’ as something more than a foolish behaviour or even a psychological malady of an individual white man who is gone mad in a hostile environment far away from home; something that is ‘une folie’ (madness), the instant of decision, evoking a possibility of reconciliation between friend and foe.
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.
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