“Sincerity and Self-Revelation in Joseph Conrad.” Modern Language Review 107.2 (2012): 341-364. (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Search for Authenticity: Aspects of Conrad's Existential Vision
Postgraduate English a Journal and Forum For Postgraduates in English, 2002
The ensuing article has been thus titled on account of the recurrent and striking correspondence between Joseph Conrad's letters, prefaces and artistic works, and the loosely tied philosophies of foremost Existentialist thinkers.The brevity of this work mandates that its objective is merely to emphasise some outstanding similarities between general existential tenets and recurring themes in Conrad's writings, most prominently, the search for authenticity.The methodology undertaken in this study will be thematic and will focus primarily on The Secret Agent, Heart of Darkness, 'Falk' and 'AmyFoster' as commensurate existential texts, although other texts such as Nostromo, The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad and A Personal Record will be occasionally referred to.These texts will be select ideas from the philosophies of leading Existentialist thinkers, especially
Conradiana, 2007
In what sense could "Tuan" Jim be said to have been "one of us"? (Lord passim). Marlow's sudden appearance in the fifth chapter of Lord Jim derails the form of what had previously seemed a conventional novel of disillusionment, and yet is motivated by nothing more than the urgency of his claim. It seems plausible to read into this urgency the repressed anxiety of an author whose relationship to his self-chosen national community remained open to question throughout his life, who after fifteen years in the most British of all professions still felt that his ability to pass for an Englishman was not taken for granted by everyone. In a classic study, Avrom Fleishman documented Conrad's affinity for post-Burkean conceptions of "organic" and self-contained national communities in meticulous detail (51ff.). More recent essays have applied his findings to Heart of Darkness and uncovered in that novel a profound meditation on the question of "Englishness." 1 Remarkably little attention, however, has been paid to Lord Jim and the way in which its central narrative rupture implicates questions of form and genre in Conrad's struggle for communal recognition and legitimation. The dominant model for such legitimation in the stories and novels that Conrad produced during the early part of his career is that of the Bildungsroman, a form that is still reflected in the opening chapters of Lord Jim. But already in these early efforts we can detect the attempt to express a model of human experience that cannot easily be incorporated into the classical framework by which the Bildungsroman medi-
Was Conrad a Racist? Authenticity in Heart of Darkness
This essay will argue, that in light of a Heidegarian existential ethic, the branding of Joseph Conrad as a racist by Chinua Achebe is entirely without foundation. In section one, I will present a brief history of the rise and fall of ethics within literary criticism, and pave the way for a viable existential approach to literary theory. In section two, I will develop a Heideggarian existential ethic, based on his magnum opus 'Being and Time', which will construct the concept of authenticity as a viable way of Being-ethical-in-the-world. In section three, I will apply this existential ethic to Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' and look to counter the claim made by Achebe that Conrad is a "bloody racist".
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.
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
Joseph Conrad S a Personal Record an Anti Confessional Autobiography
Częstochowa : Wydawnictwo Wyższej Szkoły Lingwistycznej, 2008
Joseph Conrad, as a well-known novelist, commencing to pen reminis cences about the beginnings of his nautical career and his first steps as an English writer, faced an essential dilemma.1 On one hand, the need to order and make meaningful the decisions and events from his past was so com pelling that it urged the writer to create his memoirs; on the other, Conrad's distrust of direct confession, unequivocal externalization of his intimate "self' made him choose the literary form of loose remembrances based on apparently chaotic associations referring to people and events from the past. The result was a collection of seemingly disconnected vignettes portraying different episodes from the author's days of yore. The aim of this paper is firstly, to establish to what extent Conrad's volume, A Personal Record, is an autobiography, secondly, to consider whether it is possible to create an anti confessional autobiography, and last but not least, to disclose the techniques that Conrad uses to reduce the confessional character of his recollections.
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.