Literary Herald Reviewing "Heart of Darkness" : An Environmental Perspective (original) (raw)
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Modern Fiction Studies, 2018
This essay reads Heart of Darkness as a world-ecological text, examining themes of socio-ecological violence, waste and exhaustion as theorised by the world-ecology paradigm. Specifically, it argues that the novella’s ‘unearthly’ landscape speaks to the transformative interactions of capital and nature at the commodity frontier, linking the novella’s language of enchantment to the subjective, irrational and racialised devaluations necessary to world-ecological accumulation. Offering a historical reading of the Gothic and anti-realist elements of the text’s landscape descriptions, the essay finds theoretical relevance in its refusal to separate nature from the historical categories of colonialism, capital and the commodity form.
Essay on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness Civilization vs. the Heart of Darkness
The progress of humanity over the last few millena has been substantial. From the ancient cities of Sumer in the cradle of civilization to the present day the scale of development has been extensive. The more outstanding of these achievements have been termed 'civilization'. Since those early days when societies rallied and overcame the limitations imposed by their environment to subsequent eras when new heights were reached in diverse fields, progress always found a way. However, the fact that progress has happened and has continued to happen for so long is not something that should be taken for granted. The ruins of many forgotten cities are scattered across the planet, whether overgrown by the tropics or obscured by sand, they serve as a reminder of a perilous existence. Periodic declines of societies and empires throughout history illustrate that progress can be easily stalled and even reversed if circumstances change and there is not enough force to resist these new developments. The advance of civilization is only possible when there is enough manpower to not only maintain what was achieved but to push things forwards. This implies that civilization, which is often taken for granted, may not be as firmly entrenched. But for the sake of progress, civilization learns from its mistakes and there is a substantial body literature examining what happens when things do go wrong. One such book is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness which examines the frailty of civilization as personified by people that try to build it. The main events of the book take place in the jungles of the Belgian Congo 1 and it is this extreme environment that throws into relief those things that would have been difficult to detect in a normal setting. Civilization and the Darkness: To understanding what defines civilization, the method is to examine how individuals coming from a civilized environment react to one that is diametrically opposite. This environment, the 'darkness', prevails in the jungle. There is also the 'heart of darkness' which prevails in the absolute depths of the jungle. The topics of interest are the actions, reactions and interactions of those that chose to come to the jungle with their surrounding environment. Regardless of their purpose they all had the same starting point, they were the products of civilization, they all came from societies that had varying degrees of structure and order. It was then left to the individual merits of those people as to how well they would fare when the atmosphere to which they were accustomed was no longer present. By looking at the actions of the different characters in the book as they are exposed to the darkness and then the heart of darkness, we can try to deduce the traits that are necessary to overcome a difficult environment and progress. The book contains several themes that are recurrent throughout. Though each of them by itself is important, extra insights can be gained by examining their interactions. The main themes of the book examine the effects of the omnipotent entity that Conrad terms 'the darkness' on those that choose to engage it, both the successes and the failures. The book is interesting in that a summary of the main conclusions of these interactions is given at the beginning 2 , while the explanation takes the rest of the book. It is only after reading the entire book that the weight of the statements at the beginning is fully 1 Joseph Conrad made a trip to the Belgian Congo in 1890. A sailor by profession before he became a writer, the characters described in the book are based on people he met there and throughout his travels. p.8, Murfin, R. 2 Marlow reminiscing about the Romans coming to what was now Britain lines (ll.) 125225 in the referenced text
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad: A Review
2015
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness bears particular relevance to the reader of the postmodern reader as it presents a story delving into the heart of the postcolonial discourse. At different times in history, the novella has received varying readings ranging from the postcolonial, autobiographical and even those that justify the colonizer's rationale. The reason for this is Conrad's craft in creating a truly discursive work, that remains a continuity to the present moment. This paper is a review of Conrad's masterpiece and attempts to situate it within the present context.
Ecological Unheimliche in Heart of Darkness
Unheimliche is a German word meaning "unfamiliar" or "uncanny." Sigmund Freud used the term to address a type of fear caused by feeling unease toward what is familiar. Freud, in his essay on the uncanny, describes it "[as] that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar" (Freud 1-2). The notion of the uncanny is based on another Freudian idea -the existence of the other. Both of these concepts are instrumental in elucidating my ecocritical analysis of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Ecocriticism seeks to locate the intersections of human culture and nature within literary texts. The interdisciplinary nature of the field makes it a good looking glass through which to examine the interdependent and interconnected nature characterizing the start of the 20th century. For this particular text,
Ecological Imperialism and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Research Journal of English, 2021
Ecological Imperialism is the devastation and adverse effects of Imperialism on colonized ecologies. The paper aims at discussing the adverse effects of European Imperialism on African Ecologies as portrayed by in Conrad his novel Heart of Darkness. Ecological Imperialism is a sociological phenomenon dealing with environmentally discriminatory treatment of socially marginalized or economically disadvantaged people. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad exposes European Colonizers. In order to earn more they not only maltreat native Africans but they harm their Nature also. They kill their animals; destroy their jungles just to quench their greed. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad (1899) sees Africa rich in material resources but inhabited by species of savaged humanity a little above animals with neither culture nor intelligible communication which justified the colonial exploitation of the region and the disruption of their culture and nature.
Unspeakable Secrets": The Ideology of Landscape in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness
The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 1984
How then, asked the stone, can the hammerwielder who seeks to penetrate the heart of the universe be sure that there exist any interiors? Are they not perhaps fictions, these lures of interiors for rape which the universe uses to draw out its explorers? John Coetzee, Dusklands Over the years, a number of heroic efforts have been made to restore Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to its historical moment.1 A meticulous unearthing of sources has occupied a good deal of the energy of Conrad scholarship. Much has been made, for example, of Conrad's claim that "Heart of Darkness is. .. experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case."2 Yet, there is equally a highly important sense in which the Congo of Heart of Darkness is not the Congo of any history book. That is to say, the apparently innocent activity of source-hunting masks a number of serious methodological problems. Perhaps the most important of these can be broached by invoking Conrad's contemporary, Nietzsche, for whom "there is no set of maxims more important for the historian than this: that the actual causes of a thing's origins and its eventual uses are worlds apart."3 Put in another way, between the text and its historical origins, between Heart of Darkness and the events in the Congo, there lies an area of ideological shadow. So as to confront this shadow, I will explore Conrad's troubled representation of landscape as one aspect of the ideological terrain of Heart of Darkness. If, as Octavio Paz would have it, "a landscape is not the more or less accurate description of what our eyes see. .. [but] always points to something else, to something beyond itself ... [as]. .. a metaphysic, a religion, an idea of man and the cosmos," then, at the simplest level, I will be exploring what idea of the cosmos Conrad's landscape secretly figures.4 More specifically, I will argue that Conrad draws on a number of different representations to image the Congo and that these appear, on scrutiny, to be curiously contradictory. They alternately figure the universe as penetrable, as impenetrable, as absurd, as anthropomorphic, as malign, and as primitive. A historical account of the ideological contradictions that these representations betray may restore the book more productively to its historical moment. Near the beginning of Heart of Darkness, when Marlowe voices his uneasy suspicion that he is about to set off for "the centre of the earth," he is invoking