Dynamis and Energeia in Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (original) (raw)

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.

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.

Thinking Otherwise: Ethics and Politics in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes

Joseph Conrad is usually seen as politically conservative or indifferent. Reading his late novel, Under Western Eyes, as an illustration of the relationship between ethics and politics complicates this assessment. Conrad establishes Russia as an abyssal space of otherness in his 1905 essay, " Autocracy and War. " Under Western Eyes (1911) stages the clash between Russia's non-viable political extremes (autocracy and revolution) and a Levinasian ethics of alterity. The end of the novel implies that, in the wake of complete political alienation, a new future for the nation can be imagined, one that acknowledges the self 's responsibility for the other. Using Levinas's rethinking of ethics to reinterpret Conrad's ambivalent cynicism opens up new ways of understanding the politics of modernist literature. E thical questions saturate the writings of Joseph Conrad and Emmanuel Levinas, and neither writer has a simple or clear relationship to politics. While the tensions between ethical and political realms are not identical in the proto-modernist novels of the former and the post-structuralist theory of the latter, both are concerned with the seeming incompatibility between real-world communities and absolute ethical demands. Placing Conrad's resistance to established political ideologies in dialogue with Levinas's understanding of ethics as responsibility for the other, I suggest that the tension between ethics and politics may be productive rather than paralyzing. Complicating existing readings of Conrad's politics, I hope to rethink modernist commitment more generally.

Divine Violence, Ironic Silence and Poetic Justice in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent i

Law and Literature, 2020

Silence often speaks of power's absence, whilst political power is often figured as voice. Voice speaks of identity or agency (secret or otherwise); it can even stand for subjectivity or conscious being itself. Voice is a precondition for discussion and consensus, and it is upon these notions that modern understandings of politics, of the negotiation of differences within the community through dialogue not force, depend. Hannah Arendt suggests that violence is a sign of power's absence, and if we agree, then we might wonder whether, if there is a relationship between voice and power, there exists a parallel relationship between silence and violence. ii I will argue that Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent (1907) engages self-consciously with political philosophy to explore precisely this relationship. But it is not Arendt's understanding of violence that chimes most strongly with Conrad's, but rather that of her friend, Walter Benjamin. This essay will explore Conrad's text in relation to Benjamin's Critique of Violence (1921), arguing that its concern with silence speaks to Benjamin's notion of divine violence. Benjamin's critique contradicts Arendt by finding that violence and politics are intertwined, and unlike Arendt, Benjamin regards divine violence as essential to justice. Yet Benjamin's notion of divine violence is notoriously ambiguous and contested. This essay will show how Conrad's ironic use of narrative silence enables a modernist exploration of poetic justice that provides a literary answer to lingering questions around Benjamin's theory. If the divine in Benjamin appears at points where his thinking encounters the ineffable, Conrad's silences provide alternative means to register and explore what cannot be articulated with certainty. Conrad's novel

Psychoanalytic reading of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the Freudian Pespective

Geographical discoveries and economic developments from the sixteenth to nineteenth and to the early half of twentieth centuries deeply influenced to every field of life from the politic to the literature, cultures and the lifestyles of people. The geographical discoveries and the need of imperial powers for the markets changed the balance. As the results of changes during the 16 th century, some governments such as Portugal, Russia, France and England became the great powers of the world in terms of colonialism and imperialism. Besides discovering new lands and markets they also advanced technologically that enabled them to dominate over their colonies.

Penetrating into the Dark: An Archetypal Approach to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2015

The present paper aims at providing an archetypal analysis of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness which in turn gets its most effective impetus from Carl Yung's theory of "collective unconscious". Yung believed that our collective unconscious is a primordial treasure of dreams and myths which we have inherited from the time of our forefathers and which contains the universal themes and images. For him, mythology was a textbook of archetypes, and literature contained the whole dream of mankind. In Heat of Darkness, Joseph Conrad has created a modern myth which decodes the language of the unconscious via some archetypal images. These images depict the contemporary issues of the time both on historical and psychological levels. In a series of archetypal images, which Conrad has delicately selected, organized, and interwoven, the novel represents the deepest inclinations of the universal man as well as his unconscious desires like the desire for quest, for growth, for truth, and for self-recognition. To see how these images mirror the human nature, the present paper attempts to analyze the construction and interrelations of these archetypes.

Entropy and Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent

In this short essay, I aim to argue how entroy functions as metaphor in story and discourse in The Secret Agent that serves as early concepts of fragmentation and chaos foreboding modernist ideas of fragmentation and realistic presentations of life.