Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Christopher Gogwilt (bio), Ellen Burton Harrington (bio), and Nidesh Lawtoo1 (bio) New York, June 2017: Conradian Crosscurrents. The essays collected in this special issue of Conradiana were all originally delivered in one form or another at a conference organized for the Joseph Conrad Society of America at locations a few blocks north, west, south, and east of Trump Tower: Fordham University at Lincoln Center, the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland, the Kościuszko Foundation. The constellation of essays presented here represent only a portion of the wide array of different perspectives on display at the conference. In selecting these essays, the editors have sought to capture the spirit of the event, while foregrounding certain shared resonances across the variety of different approaches to reading Conrad. In doing so, it is our hope that readers might find in these essays a sampling not only of a vibrant conference, but also of the wider landscape and soundscape within which Conrad's fiction currently circulates. Readers will hear a range of crosscurrents that shape the way Con-rad has been and continues to be read. Readers are invited also to hear crosscurrents—and undercurrents—that give critical urgency to the way Conrad is read today. And readers may also hear the resonant promise of future readings of Conrad. The subtitle of the conference, with its double focus on "creativity" and "critique," signaled an intention to bring together two kinds of response to Conrad—the creative and the critical—that are often cordoned off from each other. There has been a veritable explosion in creative responses to Conrad at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Conrad also remains central to arguments across a range of theoretical debates. "Theory" and "creative writing" as labels barely do justice to these two different sides of an ongoing engagement with Conrad. Theory, perhaps especially as embodied by its most iconic practitioners, has rarely been content to remain within the sterile quarters to which its detractors have repeatedly tried to consign it, emerging instead as dynamic [End Page 111] and creative in its own right. Even the most classical of theoretical paradigms—mimesis—turns out not to be quite what "theory" had in mind, according to the insights Nidesh Lawtoo brings to considering its protean form, both in his own essay and in his editorial interventions in reading others' essays. Creative responses, moreover, come not only in the now-classical form of rewritings of Conrad—and in Margaret Cezair-Thompson's keynote we catch a glimpse of an exciting future instance of this to come in her forthcoming novel inspired by Heart of Darkness. Such responses also appear across a range of different media and extending all the way to what Robert Hampson explores under the classification of "uncreative" writing. The genre of the critical essay, of course, usually coordinates this contrast between the creative and the critical. Many of the essays here offer examples of this in reading Conrad's texts through the lens of other writers' rewritings of those texts, including Wiesław Krajka's intertextual reading based on Conrad's "To-morrow" and its adaptations, and Catherine Delesalle's treatment of Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River in relation to Heart of Darkness, as well as Brian Richardson's rereading of Conrad's Victory among other more contemporary versions of The Tempest. The topic of this special issue engages contributors on both the creative and critical side to adopt comparative, transnational, and interdisciplinary readings that open up Conrad studies to the "outside." These include linguistic comparisons with fellow modernist travelers such as Beckett (William Atkinson), postcolonial accounts of Conrad's and Phillips's mirroring images of Europe and Africa (Delesalle), as well as intertextual analyses of Conrad's narratives that cross over to theater and musical drama (Krajka), contemporary poetry (Hampson), cinema (Christopher GoGwilt and Holt Meyer), and extend to maps charting Conrad's (actual and imagined) journeys (Anne Luyat). This also means that many of the essays collected here challenge the critique/creativity divide as well. Some rely on narrative strategies to give dramatic form to critical reflections, a creative move at play in GoGwilt's and Meyer's dialogic...