Review of Conrad, Faulkner, and the Problem of Nonsense by Anne Luyat (original) (raw)
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.
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
*The Fiction of Joseph Conrad: The Influence of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche*
1998
Although Schopenhauer's Infuence in Conrad has been acknowledged for some time, there have been no booklength studeis dealing exclusively with this subject, or the much-debated question relationship to Nietzsche. The pesent study comes to fill this gap in Conrad criticism, and show how a knoweldge of these two philoosphers' main ideas can help illuminate the cnetral concerns and presusppositions of Conrad's fiction. The author argues that the novelist was often grappling with the same problems as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and responding to some of the key issues of the Idealistic movement in the history of ideas.
REVISITING JOSEPH CONRAD (2000-2020)
ABC COLOR, 2010
A revised version of an article published originally in Suplemento Cultural del Diario “ABC Color”, Asunción, Paraguay, 2000, which proposed a new reading of two of the most important novels by Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness” and “Nostromo”.
2017
The Introduction will provide the rationale for this book and give a brief overview of the methodologies used: historical, political, sociological, anthropological and literary. It will begin with an anecdote about Joseph Conrad’s great uncle Bobrowski, a lieutenant in the French Army under Napoleon, who once ate a Lithuanian dog. This moment of ‘gastronomical degradation’ synthesizes a range of ideas—personal, national, creative, cultural—that define its author and capture the essence of this book: to investigate how food and eating underpin codes of morality, political symbolism and cultural, national and personal identities.
Un des Nôtres: Joseph Conrad and the Nouvelle Revue française
Conrad First, 2013
This article looks at the role of the influential journal La Nouvelle Revue française to understand the translation of Conrad into French and his consecration, by André Gide, Michel Leiris, and so many others. I argue that this translation and consecration led to a specifically "French" Conrad, one conceptualized with a hardship equals narrative authority equation that privileged his early seafaring work and masculine self-fashioning.
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 Ghost in the Account Book: Conrad, Faulkner, and Gothic Incalculability
Novel, 2019
“The Ghost in the Account Book” claims that the imperial fiction of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner rejects accounting as a totalizing logic and, by extension, questions the English novel's complicity in propagating faith in that false logic. Accounting, which had remained unobtrusively immanent to realist novels of empire such as Mansfield Park and Great Expectations, surfaces to the diegetic level and becomes available for critical scrutiny in high modernist novels such as Heart of Darkness or Absalom, Absalom! Drawing from writings by Max Weber (on guarantees of calculability) and Mary Poovey (on the accuracy effect), this essay attends to the dandy accountant of Heart of Darkness, the accretive narrative structure of Nostromo, and Shreve's recasting of Sutpen's life as a debtor's farce in Absalom, Absalom! If Conrad bluntly equates accounting with lying, Faulkner reveals secrets elided in rows of debit and credit one by one as sensational truths; to those ends, both writers invoke Gothic conventions. By dispatching the totalizing technique that had been invented by early modern merchants and finessed by realist novelists to generate faith in a stable fiduciary community, Conrad and Faulkner impel the invention of newer forms and figures with which to express the new imperial (and later, postcolonial) world order.