Joseph Conrad Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The dislocated, deterritorialized discourse produced by repatriates from formerly European colonies has remained overlooked in academic scholarship. One such group is the Eurasian “Indo” community that has its roots in the former Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia. This article focuses on Tjalie Robinson, the intellectual leader of this community from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. The son of a Dutch father and a British-Javanese mother, Robinson became the leading voice of the diasporic Indo community in the Netherlands and later also in the United States. His engagement resulted in the foundation of the Indo magazine Tong Tong and the annual Pasar Malam Besar, what was to become the world’s biggest Eurasian festival. Robinson played an essential role in the cultural awareness and self-pride of the eventually global Indo community through his elaboration of a hybrid and transnational identity concept. By placing his focus “tussen twee werelden” (in-between two worlds) and identifying “mixties-schap” (mestizaje) as the essential characteristic of Indo identity, Robinson anticipated debates on hybridity, transnationalism, and creolism that only much later would draw attention from scholars in the field of postcolonial studies. This article highlights Robinson’s pioneering role in framing a deterritorialized hybrid alternative to nationalist essentialism in the postcolonial era.

- by
- •
- Cultural Studies, Cultural Sociology, Self and Identity, Southeast Asian Studies
- by Brandon Jernigan
- •
- The Novel, Narrative, Maritime History, Embodiment
- by Ronald Walker
- •
- Narratology, Historical Fiction, Joseph Conrad, Early 20th Century British Fiction
- by Paolo Lago
- •
- Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Joseph Conrad, Bram Stoker, Colonialismo
- by Alpesh Kantilal Patel
- •
- Contemporary Art, Poland, Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

This paper conducts a comparative dispositif analysis of Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella 'Heart of Darkness' and James Gray’s 2019 cinematic adaptation 'Ad Astra', in order to assess whether the imperial legacy implicit within the novella... more

- by Adam R . North
- •
- Colonialism, Post-Colonialism, Michel Foucault, Joseph Conrad

Can heroes, that one comes to idealise over years, actually be evil? Are discourses around their extraordinary courage created to hide their ordinary degeneracy? Moreover, is it their 'natural' human nature that is capable of both good and evil, at fault? Or is it the far more sinister impulse to categorise them as either of these two facets of man's personality that is responsible? These are some of the questions that the paper would aim at answering by studying how false discourses around matters of 'heroism' and 'heroes' are produced which are then further propounded in order to hide the

- by Vasundhara Chaudhry
- •
- Discourse, Colonialism, Heroism, Manipulation in Discourse
- by stephen wolfe
- •
- English Literature, Literature, Border Studies, Border Poetics

Literary critics are interested in meaning (interpretation) but when linguists, such as Haj Ross, look at literature, they’re interested in structure and mechanism (poetics). Shakespeare presents a particular problem because his plays exist in several versions, with Hamlet as an extreme case (3 somewhat different versions). The critic doesn’t know where to look for the “true” meaning. Where linguists to concern themselves with such things (which they mostly don’t), they’d be happy to deal with each of version separately. Undergraduate instruction in literature is properly concerned with meaning. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has become a staple because of its focus on race and colonialism, which was critiqued by Chinua Achebe in 1975 and the ensuing controversy and illustrates the problematic nature of meaning. And yet, when examined at arm’s length, the text exhibits symmetrical patterning (ring composition) and fractal patterning. Such duality, if you will, calls for two complementary critical approaches. Ethical criticism addresses meaning (interpretation) and naturalist criticism addresses structure and mechanism (poetics).

- by Bill Benzon
- •
- Shakespeare, Literary Criticism, Poetics, Linguistics

The possibility of native resistance to colonial tyranny and the threat of the loss of colonial “order” is a sustained anxiety throughout Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. Critics have largely ignored or downplayed these inscriptions of resistance in Conrad's text. Much of the criticism that surrounds this novella, according to Patrick Brantlinger, is focused on the European subjects of the text, and therefore renders Africa and its native peoples as a kind of backdrop. Literary critiques of Heart of Darkness that do discuss the African natives tend to portray them as victims rather than having any kind of agency. This latent fear of native resistance demonstrates the fantasy of stability and superiority endemic to imperialism: a narrative that the imperial administration must continually tell itself.

- by Charlie Wesley
- •
- Postcolonial Studies, Colonialism, Edward Said, Anxiety

In H. G. Wells's The Time Machine and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, power is exercised for its own sake and in the name of “civilization”. The split of society in The Time Machine presents how it would look like in the future if the class problems would prevail. Rich segments of society using their power for power's sake further pushed the poor classes underground, both metaphorically and literally. Inequality shaped the evolution of these two classes in strikingly different ways. The Heart of Darkness, on the other hand, presents a fraction of human history to exemplify the terrific consequences of a mindset that would exercise his power on anything just because he can. One can consider Wells’ novel to be a prophetic result of Conrad’s civilization concept. In both novels, the ways of exercising power are excused by misunderstood concepts of "civilization" and wronged the paths the human race should have taken.

- by Serkan Kasapoğlu
- •
- Modern English Novel, Novel, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells

A brief comparative look at honour in two modernist works.

- by Juliane Prade-Weiss
- •
- William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Modernity

Originally entitled ‘The Castaway’, Joseph Conrad’s tale ‘Amy Foster’ (1901) tells the story of a Polish man who, after leaving his home to sail the seas, comes to reside, work, and raise a family in the county of Kent in south-east England. In this respect it corresponds unusually closely to its author’s own post-maritime history, though the story’s main protagonist, an illiterate peasant from the Carpathian mountains, is very unlike Conrad. Influentially, Edward Said read ‘Amy Foster’ as a great statement on the theme of exile, personally and historically important to Conrad, as to Said himself. This paper approaches the tale as a study of immigration and the reception of the immigrant (a critical issue in many parts of the world today), and discusses its staging of the drama of hospitality, and of what Derrida called ‘hostipitality’, attending to different forms of hospitality, and inhospitability, in the tale. Moving from the content of the story to its narrative rhetoric in the context of practices of Victorian and modernist fiction, the paper goes on to explore what this tale may show of the kind of qualified hospitality that modern fiction such as Conrad’s offers to the characters who come to reside in it.

- by Douglas Kerr
- •
- Jacques Derrida, Hospitality, Joseph Conrad, Immigrants

Summary: Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now counts as one of the best (anti-) war movies ever made, The aim of this article is to show how Classical mythology is employed in this film to represent and understand America’s Vietnam War experience. Not only does Apocalypse Now contain various references to the Odyssey, the storyline itself is structured as a myth. In our article, we show how Coppola and his screenwriter John Milius used Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero With a Thousand Faces and James Frazer’s The Golden Bough to give their film a powerful mythological foundation. These mythological references add depth to the movie and are used to manipulate the audience's expectations. Thus the artistic accomplishment of Apocalypse Now demonstrates the enduring power of myth.

- by Rolf Strootman
- •
- Mythology, Film Studies, Literature and cinema, Film Analysis

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is one of the finest works in English literature where setting plays a vital role upholding the theme. In this novella none of the themes is explicit in the surface of the story, rather the different themes are encapsulated with the different aspects of the story and one of them is ‘setting’. This study goes on finding the uniqueness in the integration of ‘setting’ and ‘theme’ in this world famous text on colonization and primitiveness.

- by Ahmad Mahbub-ul-Alam
- •
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

In this dialogue, political theorist William E. Connolly joins forces with Nidesh Lawtoo to bring Conrad studies in the planetary age. They argue that Conrad's fictions of nautical catastrophe can help us not only diagnose but also navigate the unpredictable mimetic, contagious, and spiraling currents that are currently taking us in the age of the planetary age of the Anthropocene: from pandemic crises to (new) fascist crises, cataclysmic typhoons to rapid climate change in the planetary epoch of the Anthropocene.

- by Nidesh Lawtoo
- •
- English Literature, Modernism (Literature), Political Theory, Poststructuralism

At the heart of this article is a fairly straightforward assertion: that literature has a trans-verbal level at which it affects us as a work of art. Hence discussing a novel means bringing to the fore not only its overt narrative function but also its covert artistic function: a consideration of the work in light of its aesthetic intention. Following the phenomenological traditions of Roman Ingarden and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I argue that aesthetic intention does not determine the significance of the art object, which is presumed to be dynamic within a spectrum of meanings. Rather, aesthetic intention takes into account the circumstance of the novel having been actuated into form by an " artistic gesture. " This " gesture " is not physical: it is a metaphorical motion referring to the artist's actuation of an aesthetic intention using one or another medium to give an artwork its perceivable form. In painting, this " gesture " can sometimes be traced through a work's visible brushstrokes or formal composition, but in literature such " gestures " can appear beyond the literal text and remain invisible even while they are experienced in the literary work. The conception of such a " gesture " is meant to incorporate the insights of literary and aesthetic theory, along with poststructuralism, in a critique that allows for structural analysis to also pursue a reconstituted significance. What appears below is more a program of the problem than a full treatment of its implications – a stretching of the canvas, so to speak. But I believe that the articulation of this kernel has a value in itself even if the full unraveling of the subject is yet to come.

- by David Stromberg
- •
- Philosophy, Aesthetics, Art Theory, Plato

The authors posit syphilis as the source for Kurtz’s affliction in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and argue for understanding the novella as a deployment of the rhetoric of disease, which yokes together medical fears and problematic sexual morality with a global violence infecting self-congratulatory European benevolence and charity. Conrad’s tale is both implicitly and explicitly eroticized as well as steeped in gothic representation of the hidden and revealed to manage an unsayable horror. As such, the language of the story parallels pervasive late nineteenth-century syphilis discourse that likewise relies on obfuscation and silences. Descriptions of Kurtz’s megalomania resonate with the symptomatology of syphilis and perceived syphilitics, such as Nietzsche and Columbus, who might have served as models for the character.

- by wendy ryden
- •
- Art, Literature and Medicine, Victorian Literature, Joseph Conrad

Seit ihrer Wiederentdeckung in den letzten Jahren ist Hannah Arendt aus den öffentlichen Debatten zu Freiheit, Unterdrückung und Flucht kaum mehr wegzudenken. Doch nicht nur, was sie dachte, ist von schlagender Aktualität, genauso bedeutsam ist, wie sie dachte. Maike Weißpflug präsentiert uns eine unentdeckte Hannah Arendt und geht in ihrer mitreißend erzählten Studie den Quellen ihres höchst ungewöhnlichen Denkstils nach. Diese findet sie nicht in der Philosophie, sondern vor allem in ihren Lektüren von Dichtern wie Homer, Conrad und Brecht. Mit ihnen wendet sich die politische Theoretikerin gegen alle großen und umfassenden Erklärungen und Theorien und macht die kleinteilige und sinnliche Erfahrungswelt zu ihrem Ausgangspunkt: Die Kunst, politisch zu denken, besteht vor allem im Mut, sich zwischen alle Stühle zu setzen. Streitbar zu sein, setzt voraus, die Welt aus der Perspektive anderer betrachten zu können und trotzdem selbst zu denken.

- by Maike Weißpflug
- •
- Political Theory, Literature, Laughter, Franz Kafka
- by Andrew van der Vlies
- •
- Adaptation, Conrad, Joseph, Desire, Modernism

This essay provides an account of nihilism after Nietzsche, beginning with pre-WW I nihilism, which was associated with decadence and gave rise to an investigation of the primitive, the mythical, and the unconscious. Then I turn to an examination of the nihilistic despair and apocalypticism of the period from the beginning of WW I to the end of WW II. This leads to an examination of nihilism and absurdity in the 1950s and 1960s, before concluding with an examination of nihilism and irony in critical theory and postmodernism. I argue throughout that Nietzsche remains decisive for the later understanding of nihilism and conclude that all attempts to come to terms with nihilism are necessarily inadequate but bring us closer to understanding the uncanny question at its heart.

- by Michael A. Gillespie
- •
- Philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida

In the Chancellor's Lecture at Amherst on 18 February 1975, titled An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", Chinua Achebe saw Joseph Conrad as “a thoroughgoing racist”, Achebe asserts that Conrad's famous novel (published in 1902) dehumanizes Africans, rendering Africa as “a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril”. This caused controversy, right from the venue of the lecture, where some western professors refused to support Achebe’s views. The researchers analyze the lecture, bringing out its strengths and weaknesses and making an independent synthetic view of it. In our view, Conrad’s book is seen as a work which brings out the beauty of the African natural settings and the evil behavior of intruding Europeans searching for ivory. Nevertheless, Conrad’s book is also seen as hastily pandering to the erroneous zeitgeist of the time it was written (given that some African culture had beauty in them) and Achebe’s response is seen as a bit severe and non-diversified (giving that not much of Africa had western civilization at the time of the appearance of Conrad’s novel and not all of African culture had beauty in them). This critique is contextualized by making references to aspects of Western negativities and backwardness within the novel or around 1902 and aspects of African beauty and backwardness within the novel or around 1902 also. Therefore, both Conrad’s Novella and Achebe’s Essay have their flaws and strengths.

- by Jeff Unaegbu
- •
- African Studies, Joseph Conrad, Criticism, Chinua Achebe

This essay argues for the centrality of the dialectic of ideology and utopia in Joseph Conrad’s novelistic work. Unlike Jameson (1981), I argue that grasping this dialectic neither presupposes jettisoning the traditional categories of plot and character nor challenging the established consensus on skepticism and pessimism as the twin cognitive and psychological pillars on which Conrad’s oeuvre rests. On the contrary, I contend, grasping the reflexive nature of skeptical and pessimistic negation in Conrad—the dimension of a “negation of the negation”—allows us to relocate the functions of the ideological and the utopian within the “traditional” categories of narrative structure and character function. After establishing the precise form that ideology and utopia take in Conrad’s work—tortuous reaffirmation of the established order and the radical intrusion, within that order, of an alien and collective subjectivity, respectively—I proceed to demonstrate their relevance for reading Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900) and Victory (1915).

- by Antonis Balasopoulos
- •
- Ideology, Modernism, Joseph Conrad, Utopia
- by Vera Prikhodko
- •
- Self and Identity, Representation of Others, Joseph Conrad, Otherness
- by Laurence Davies
- •
- Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson

Trabajo sobre la novela de Mario Vargas Llosa: El sueño del celta.

- by Sébastien Abbet
- •
- Joseph Conrad, Mario Vargas Llosa, Belgian Congo, El sueño del celta

Ensayo incluido dentro del 4º número de la revista Presura coordinada por Alberto Venegas.

- by Carlos Gómez Gurpegui
- •
- History, Cultural Studies, Video Games, Videogames

The development of the interdisciplinary studies has influenced how critics conceive of literary works. Approaching literature through another artistic discipline such as the painterly or the theatrical allows interpreters to explore in depth the artistic dimension of literature as to the visual and the performative. These pictorial paradigms in the Modernist short stories, for instance, are one of the founding stones of the very meaning of the tales in that they are the concrete embodiment of how form serves content. As a proto-Modernist, Joseph Conrad is no exception. His short stories adhere to those paradigms. His "The Informer" is a story of anarchists where action reigns supreme, evoking certain visual elements in the audiences' minds, next to the abundance of descriptions and portrayals which add to the pictorial aspect of the tale. Within this framework, this essay attempts at exploring how the pictorial paradigm (as an aesthetic and structural/formal element) serves the thematic focus of the narrative (basically the social and political.) It thus addresses the characters' portrayal, the tale's style, and their thematic implications by means of satire to establish that latter aspect. This is with reference as to how the author's philosophies about those themes are being performed in relation with the storytelling process as a guiding line throughout the essay. In a first part, this essay will tackle the different character portrayals and their entailed mental images. In another part, it will deal with another aspect of the pictorial, which is the performative, and how the latter has to do with scene creation.

- by Khouloud Attaya
- •
- Performativity, Pictorialism, Interdisciplinary Studies, Joseph Conrad
- by Miles Thorn
- •
- Film Analysis, Joseph Conrad
- by Naomi Toth
- •
- Colonialism, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Modernism, Joseph Conrad