Hearts of Darkness. Melville, Conrad and Narratives of Oppression (original) (raw)
2010, Hearts of Darkness. Melville, Conrad and Narratives of Oppression
The goal of this volume of edited essays is to fill a gap on the comparativist chart. The volume came about as a result of a joint effort at a bifocal reflection of the international community of Melvilleans and Conradians in Szczecin, Poland, in August, 2007. What became clear in formal and informal discussion among the participants of that international gam was that Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski shared the intuition that the essential liquidity of the existential human condition necessitates a “universal squeeze of the hand.” This idea, beautifully conceptualized by Melville in chapter 94 of Moby-Dick, caused both writers to examine in their complex narratives the ways in which various kinds of oppression prevent this desired possibility. The argument of this volume begins with three essays describing enslavement and race in key Melville and Conrad works: “Babo’s Shadow: Tropes of Enslavement/Visions of Race. In the next group of essays, “Playing in the Dark: Otherness in Postcolonial Perspectives,” the reader is invited to revisit both writers’ stances on othering and otherness, especially in the light of postcolonial studies. Such background knowledge is then deepened by two chapters on the interactions between the literary texts and imperial politics: “Cold Empires: Imperial Politics and the Space of Literature.” Essays on systematic oppression, predictably, lead to reflection offered by the authors of chapters making up Part Four: “Making Sense of Sukering: The Smoldering of Human Existence.” They investigate individual metaphysical or existential suffering, for which the oppressive cultural practices are responsible. The final two chapters of the book sublimate some of the conclusions of the earlier sections by exploring the unsettling oppressiveness of the Unheimlich.
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