Conrad's Heart Of Darkness Research Articles

Heart of darkness: joseph conrad's anti-imperialistic perception throughout racism, pessimism, impressionism

Imperialism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness is one of the chief focal aspects of critical controversy and debate in the fields of literary theory and literary criticism. The aim of the study is to examine the ideological background to viewing Conrad as anti-imperialist in ‘Heart of Darkness’, while dealing also with the presentation of imperialism and racism. The study reveals that Conrad was consciously anti-imperialist but he unconsciously or carelessly employed racist terminology. The novel is a moving record of White imperialism in the Belgian Congo and of the intense suffering of the Africans. It conveys Conrad's nihilistic impression of the Whites who exercised unpardonable authority over natives. As Conrad sets up Africa as a foil to Europe and a place of negation and cannibalism, many contemporary critics viewed the text as a racist work. But in writing about the diabolical practice of White imperialism in Africa, can Conrad be seen as an extremist in terms of racism? Does he support the dehumanization of natives which is practiced by the Whites in the name of a civilizing role? The study scrupulously examines these controversial elements in the text and concludes that Conrad's impressionistic narrative technique, incorporating a pessimistic viewpoint, along with his disillusioned emotions over what seems to be White cannibalism in the Congo, and the excessively grim nature of the novel Heart of Darkness, all serve Conrad's anti-imperialistic perspective effectively. Conrad's anti-imperialistic ideology employed in Heart of Darkness provides then a tremendous attack on inhuman, brutalized White imperialism. The absence of joys, success and optimism that strengthen the impression of extreme negation throughout the novel is evidence of Conrad's deeply anti-imperialistic perspective.

Art Versus Racism: T. S Eliot’s the Hollow Men and Black Identity

The Anglo-American poet T. S. Eliot refers to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, among other literary and historical sources in his well-known poem entitled The Hollow Men. The link of this poem to his earlier works in the neo-Metaphysical tradition has already been established by various scholars and critics of twentieth century English literature. What eludes the awareness of Eliot's readers is the specific relevance of his verse style to White supremacists' apprehension of issues which concern poetry, culture and society in the West. One central theme of The Hollow Men is duncehood insofar as this human condition reveals itself in supposedly meaningless or barren engagements like rustic dance, singing, verbal (folk) expression and festivity outside a typically European landscape. In previous studies, literary commentators have failed to read Eliot's poem correctly by relating it to the behavior of African-Americans of Harlem Renaissance, or of Blacks in exile generally. This study is an analysis and interpretation of Eliot's writing that suggests his racial bigotry and intolerance, but everything can be seen in terms of the Western conservative outlook on politics, culture, and man's destiny in the modern world.

Hybridity and trepidation of multiculturalism in Gabriel Garcia Marquezs Of Love and Other Demons and Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness

Limiting this analysis to the challenging issue of identity, this work intends to account for how hybridity implies a great sense of trepidation, “cultural anxiety”, othering and shadowy multiculturalism. Running against the contention that hybridity opens up horizons and fertile grounds of cultural negotiation, the author argues that hybridity does not resolve identitary questionings and enigmas inasmuch as it obfuscates the quest for a gravitational center from which to launch a civilizational project. There is, therefore, a demanding need for retrieving the specificities of national culture as Frantz Fanon posits, which is only guaranteed through solidifying a sense of belonging to a well-defined cultural context. With this in mind, the author proposes to build his arguments on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Of Love and Other Demons and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darknessas two case studies. Both novels tackle the issue of hybridity in Latin American and African contexts. The figures of Sierva Maria and Kurtz are, in fact, emblematic of false catalysts of cultural mobility. This can be inferred from their conducts and responses to their surroundings. Their madness and irrationality allude to the pathological drawbacks of an identity fraught with cultural duality. To this point, it is obvious that the scope of this study is to account for the fallacy of multiculturalism once associated with hybridity. The corollary pursuit of this hypothesis is both characters do inhabit two cultural realms without being able to fully situate themselves into one of them either. Key words: Identity, hybridity, irrationality, colonial culture and postcolonialism.

Exploration and Post-Darwinian Anxiety in Thomas Hardy'sTwo on a Tower

Abstract I examine Hardy's use of astronomical imagery in his novel Two on a Tower (1882), and draw a parallel between exploration of the unknown universe and of unknown areas of the Earth during the height of Imperial expansion. The fear, both physical and psychical, associated with such exploration is illustrated by references to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The relationship between Darwin's theories and late Victorian ideas of the primitive, is discussed with reference to Swithin St Cleeve's journey to the southern hemisphere to suggest that threats to traditional certainties may be countered by an increase in reason and knowledge, and moral certainty by an acceptance of the possibility of change. I suggest that Hardy challenges the view that science and human experience are irreconcilable, and that in Two on a Tower he shows that progress depends on the synthesis of 'heart' and 'mind.'

Sprachratgeber und Stillehren in Deutschland (1923-1967): Ein Vergleich der Sprachund Stilauffassung in vier politischen Systemen by Claudia Law

I I44 Reviews In literature,visuality can be found inboth description and narration. Its functions reach fromdescribing the characters' vision to symbolic and structural uses such as leitmotifs,symbols, and the incorporation of visual media. By comparing visual aspects of threenarrative textswith theircinematic interpre tations, Sandra Poppe investigates the relationship between the uses and functions of visuality in literature and film as well as questions of intermediality and of the theoryof description. The lastpart ofMarcel Proust's A la recherchedu temps perdu, Le tempsretrouve,and the eponymous filmby Raoul Ruiz, Franz Kafka's Der Pro cessand Orson Welles's Le proces/Ilprocesso, and Joseph Conrad's Heart ofDarkness along with Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now Redux arewell-chosen examples: not only do they represent a broad spectrum ofmodern culture, but they have also widely been acknowledged for the complexity of theirvisual descriptions and for the importance of visuality forsemantic and structural aspects. In the first,theoretical part, the study establishes forms bywhich visuality ispre sented in literary textsand in cinema, focusing on the relationship between narrative and descriptive elements. The second, analytical part compares different represen tations of visuality in the six examples. Poppe finds 'pure' description, a focus on the actual description of characters and places, mainly in theworks of Proust and Ruiz. Welles, she claims, uses visual aspects to connect his highly political cinematic interpretation ofDer Process to its literary model. InCoppola's free transformation of Conrad's novella, themetaphoric use of visual leitmotifs and of colours gives the two works a similarmeaning, even though they are set indifferent times and superficially tell ratherdifferentstories.Visuality in its many variations and functions,Poppe con cludes, is a common and prominent feature in all texts examined, 'a bridge between themedia' and even 'theaesthetic core of each individual work of art' (p. 32I). The study provides a thorough exploration of the concept of visuality and itsdif ferent forms and functions in literature and cinema. In the chapter on 'Visualitat in der Literatur' in particular, Poppe reaches beyond obvious aspects of visual repre sentation inwriting by exploring structural and semantic functions of visuality. Yet the study's strength-its thoroughness-also runs the riskof being itsweakness. The many details and the sometimes over-complicated language, along with thedifficulty of describing visual phenomena entirely through language, are occasionally indanger of obscuring the general sense. None the less, this is a valuable and broad study that enriches thediscussion of visuality as a feature of comparative interpretation. ABERYSTWYTHUNIVERSITY KARINAVONLINDEINER-STRASKY Sprachratgeber und Stillehren inDeutschland (I923-I967): Ein Vergleich der Sprach und Stilauffassung in vier politischen Systemen. By CLAUDIA LAW. Berlin: de Gruyter. 2007. XV+272 pp. E88. ISBN 978-3-II-OI8363-4. The best German is thatused by Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and Luther. 'Schreibe, wie du sprichst', use verbs to refer to actions, rather than nouns, never use the pas sive, and keep your sentences syntactically simple. Avoid foreignwords. These are the main grammatical and stylistic recommendations thatwe read over and over again in style guides and prescriptive grammars from their very beginnings, which-for German-can be placed in the seventeenth century and which we can still find in any modern publication advising readers on the ills of language decline and the benefits of speaking and writing properly. Claudia Law's Manchester dissertation unearths very similar pieces of advice in her corpus of twentieth-century works. Her aim is to examine whether perceptions of good and bad language as shown inprescriptive works aimed at a lay audience-are affected by thepolitical system inwhich they are MLR, I03.4, 2oo8 I I45 published. Twentieth-century Germany proves an interesting testing ground with its rapidly changing political history, and Law defines fourperiods significant toher study: the Weimar Republic (I9I9-33), theThird Reich (I933-45), the early Federal Republic (FRG: 1949-67) and the young GDR (I949-1965). For each period she selects four pieces which were well-known and successful publications at the time. Her analysis is fundamentally divided into their treatmentof Sprache and their treat ment ofStil, and these sections are furthersubdivided intokey socio-political factors: with regard toSprache we find sections on the perceptions of language, namely the perception of language history...

A Picture of the Big Apple

n section York, U.S.A., of Mandela's Earth and Other Poems, Wole Soyinka sculpts verbal portrait of New York City and projects an image of United States. He adopts an overtly ritualistic approach and refuses to take any definite ideological position. Maxim Gorky's representation of NewYork in The City of Yellow Devil foregrounds Marxian image of money as universal whore that corrupts all, and is basically critique of capitalism from solely socialist perspective. So are Vladimir Mayakovsky's poems about US. On contrary, in O. Henry's New York, capitalism is conceived of as politicoeconomic system with human face and guarantee of personal freedom. Brendan Behan's New York is celebration of friendliest, the greatest city on face of God's earth, and the wonder of world (13, 12). What appears contemptible and despicable to Gorky, Soyinka, and Mayakovsky about New York is perceived by O. Henry and Brendan Behan, both humorists, as spice of life. The approach adopted by Soyinka rather suppresses humorous. Whatever differences do appear in diverse portraits of city, one thing stands out clearly: New York is great. It does not matter that some of writers try vainly to hide fact. The city leaves strong impression on their minds, which is why they care to write about it. Rapturously enamored of city, Brendan Behan's wife likens it to a fancy fair and considers anybody who is not impressed by its skyline either half blind or simply liar (Brendan 13). Broken down into five units and conceived as an initiation rite, poem York, U.S.A. takes form of travelogue. It reads like Soyinka's covert retort to Joseph Conrad's Heart ofDarkness and similar colonial texts about Africa. It is extremely difficult, if not indeed impossible, to determine what part of picture represents poet's direct experience in US and what part derives from books and other sources of information about country. Aptly titled Initiation, first unit takes poet-protagonist through airport rituals. Its first stanza introduces most of problems discussed in poem. The aircraft noise, disordered echoes of feet of disgorged passengers walking away from plane, multilingual queues, COLOR CODES signs, tight tunnels, and duty-free shops coupled with huge billboards initiate poet into menace of noise, history of genocide, slavery, and other forms of methodical madness that

The Shape of Fear: Horror and the fin de Siècle Culture of Decadence by Susan J. Navarette (review)

Reviews215 (227). In sum, that despite the many flaws in his character, he was really the "Grand Old Man" of Victorian politics. This convincing exercise in psycho-history is meticulously researched, objective, and exceedingly well written. Its merit is augmented by an informative endnote apparatus, an inclusive bibliography of Gladstonia, and some very pertinent illustrations. Crosby deserves the accolade of "a job well done". J.O. BAYLEN Eastbourne, England Susan J. Navarette. The Shape of Fear: Horror and the fin de Siècle Culture of Decadence. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1998. xii + 314. $37.95 US (cloth). In The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de Siècle Culture of Decadence, Susan J. Navarette examines the way in which fin de siècle horror fiction reflected nineteenth-century scientific theories and the cultural anxieties these theories engendered. Ranging broadly over disciplines as distinct as biology, philology, geology, physics, and anthropology, Navarette stresses the uniformity of their methodologies, all of which involved reading "distinctive surface patterns and structures" in order to understand "occult mechanisms and processes" (5). Fin de siècle horror writers in turn drew upon this scientific methodology as they sought "to record and reenact in narrative form what they understood to be the entropie, devolutionary and degenerative forces prevailing within the natural world" (6). Ultimately these works register the imminent sense of doom and decay that we have come to associate with the fin de siècle mentality. One of the strengths of the book is its selection of primary texts. Sacrificing quantity of literary texts for quality of analysis, Navarette focuses on five key works. Of these five texts, three are examples of what Navarette calls "literary detritus" or "refuse" (6) — works that have been largely ignored by critics: Walter de la Mare's "A:B:0," Vernon Lee's "The Doll," and Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan. Navarette argues that these works have as much to say about the culture that produced them as do canonical texts such as Henry James's The Turn ofthe Screw and Joseph Conrad's Heart ofDarkness, works which are also included in her study. Her book is divided into two sections. The first section, comprised of four chapters, demonstrates the 216Victorian Review effect o the arts of science's rendering of the body as a text to be read. In this section, attention is given to works in which the apparently normal body masks degenerative tendencies. Fundamental to this discussion are de la Mare's "A:B:0," James's The Turn ofthe Screw," and "Lee's "The Doll." The second section focuses on the nineteenthcentury tendency to treat text or language as an organic body. In this section, Navarette discusses Machen's The Great God Pan and Conrad's Heart of Darkness — works in which cultural decline is reflected through language and textual disruption. At the beginning of the first section, Navarette sets up the parameters of her argument tracing the emergence of the ideas of body as text and text as body in the science and arts of the earlier nineteenth century. She skilfully interweaves scientific and literary material in a way that clearly demonstrates the increasing interest in and absorption of scientific ideas by artists. It was the new sciences, Navarette claims, which ultimately undermined the Romantic notion that "truth was beauty and beauty truth" by "revealfing] that even all that seemed benign or beautiful merely masked — was in reality symptomatic of or premonitory of — extensive processes of decay" (31). This notion of a deceptive surface caused most anxiety when applied to the human body, a fact attested to by the prominence given in the nineteenth century to the studies of criminal anthropologists such as Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso's criminalizing of the human body in turn had an impact on the criminalization of the artistic text, for he served as an inspiration to Max Nordau who used the artistic text to reveal the degeneracy of its creator. This "dynamic between external forms and internal disorders" (41) was fascinating to the writers of fin de siècle horror who exploited its possibilities to the fullest. Navarette concludes the chapter with an examination of Oscar Wilde...

Learning by Doing: Writing a Novel in English Class

Imagine a basketball team that spends all of its time watching videotapes of great basketball games of the past. For a particularly good move by a Cousy or a Mikan or a Chamberlain, the coach freezes the frame on the tape, discusses the significance of the player's accomplishment, and rewinds the tape so that his players can watch it again. The players take notes on different kinds of offenses and defenses, on how to shoot free throws, on effective rebounding. Once every week or so, they go through some layup drills and take some shots from the floor. But never, never, do they play an actual game. At the end of the season, they earn their letters by taking a written test, on which they are expected to identify Great Moves in Basketball by player, game, and significance, and write essays discussing offensive and defensive strategies. My scenario is ludicrous, of course. The whole purpose of a basketball team is to play basketball. And yet this imaginary basketball team represents figuratively what happens all too often in English classes studying the novel. Our students read novels; discuss point of view, tone, imagery, characterization, plot construction; articulate themes and emotional responses. And while they may learn much about particular novels and particular novelists, they still regard the novel itself as some longer version of a short story, a lengthy product that cannot be planned or crafted, but that springs through some mysterious inspiration from the forehead of The Artist. They have no sense of plan or choice on the part of novelists, no sense of their decisions on what to dramatize and what to omit, what point of view to employ, what characters to develop. Such gaps in learning can disappear f we ask our students to write a novel-if we get them into the game, so to speak. My modest proposal is not as outrageous as it sounds, for I speak from experience. Over an eight-week period, my fifteen students in junior English wrote a novel. It was only one novel, for which each student produced one chapter, and it was only ninety-one double-spaced, typed pages long. Nevertheless, it comprised all the characteristics of the books we study in school: a coherent plot, fully developed characters that experience some change in the course of the story, a sense of place, a consistent point of view. Moreover, it taught the students what a novel is: a carefully planned narrative with a distinct beginning, middle, and end. They learned how to introduce characters, how to integrate exposition with dialogue, how to keep characters alive, and how to make plot twists probable. No academic integrity suffered for the sake of this exercise in creative writing. The junior-year sequence here at Woodberry Forest is broken into trimesters, with students rotating among three teachers during the three trimesters to study respectively poetry, drama, and the novel. I saw these students for a total of only ten weeks, and in those ten weeks we studied Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, Faulkner's Light in August, Wharton's Ethan Frome, and Conrad's Heart ofDarkness. We also covered eight units of vocabulary and wrote five analytical essays. The writing of a novel did not displace this core curriculum. It was not until we had read The Great Gatsby and were ready to start on Faulkner, in fact, that we began the process of writing our own novel. The first step was to decide on a general type-histor-

Conrad's Heart of Darkness as Creation Myth

Conrad's Heart of Darkness as Creation Myth

Saving the appearances in Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Saving the appearances in Conrad's Heart of Darkness