Heart Of Darkness Research Articles

A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern Literature

A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern Literature

Critical Insights: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Critical Insights: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Rethinking Joseph Conrad's Concepts of Community: Strange Fraternity

Rethinking Joseph Conrad's Concepts of Community: Strange Fraternity

TRANSFORMATION OF ‘IDENTITY’ AND ‘SELF’ IN ISOLATION: AN ANALYSIS OF JOSEPH CONRAD’S SELECT WORKS

Isolation means living in separation or alone. Isolation can be voluntary or involuntary, it is the synonym of alienate. Alienation is a feeling of being estranged or neglected. The term isolation by definition refers to being apart or to cut off from others, or from the society as a whole. People isolate themselves for various reasons, some try to recharge or heal themselves, or isolate themselves for escapism, atonement, search for identity or just for being peaceful beings all for themselves. The positivity of isolation teaches self-help, patience, gives you the experience and wisdom of your actions, makes you feel the value of your home country and your family and the value of the sweet moments, but unfortunately for people who are driven into isolation struggle in its emptiness and its haunting darkness, it is observed that people who are isolated are driven and compelled to isolate themselves by the circumstances in their lives. In the Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Under Western Eyes the themes of isolation and solitude are very prominent through which the author discusses the psychological condition of his characters and the challenges that human beings by nature are meant to endure, he has even lived those psychological conditions and endured the pangs of alienation. He makes his characters acquaint with this kind of phenomena and that they become the agents to rectify and overcome these obstacles and impediments, another perspective is that isolation and solitude can simply just resonate with the thought of atonement, or to experience a sense of freedom and peace in isolation, escapism or urge for the search of one’s identity.

The Application of Venuti’s Translational Strategies to The Translation of Conrad's Novel "Heart of Darkness" From English Into Arabic

One of the most essential goals of translation is to bridge the gap between two cultures in two different languages since the misunderstanding of the SL culture may cause mistranslation especially in translating the literary text. In the light of that culture and literary language are elements that should be taken into consideration.The current study aims at applying Venuti’s strategies of translation (1995) in Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of Darkness” from English into Arabic. The main aims of this study are to identify the most common strategies adopted by the translators of the above novel according to Venuti’s strategies of translation and explore the basic problems found in the translation of the novel to indicate whether the translations are appropriate or not.One of the problematic issues that may appear is the difference between English and Arabic that makes translation between them challenging. Also, the aesthetic function of literary language could be problematic to the translation, in which it might cause ambiguity.To grasp the above-mentioned aims and produce a well-translated literary work, the study hypothesizes that translating the literary texts especially the figurative images make problems for translators. So, translators need to investigate the expressions of figurative language that relate to the literary language carefully such as simile, metaphor, irony. etc. To achieve the validity of those hypotheses, applying Venuti's strategies which comprise two opposing concepts: domestication and foreignization seem suitable strategies to present almost appropriate rendering.The study concludes that due to the differences in culture and language between the English and Arabic languages, especially in the field of literature, many problems may appear in the translation process. Hence the translator has to decide on which strategy or method he should adopt to bridge this gap and transfer the message effectively.

Marlow’s Growth in Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece, is one of the most famous British novels of the 20th century. Marlow’s 
 journey to Africa can be taken as the voyage of growth, which was mainly embodied by his self-realization. By analyzing the plot 
 structure of Heart of Darkness, this paper probes into the deep structure of this novel with Marlow’s growth as a clue, which is 
 helpful to read the growth theme of this novel.

“It Was the Stillness of an Implacable Force”: A Lyotardian Study of Ecology in Heart of Darkness

This essay examines nature in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in the light of Lyotard’s discourse of ecology and his other philosophical ideas. His postmodernist criticism of conformity and representability, as asserted in his notion of ecology and implied throughout his whole philosophy, provides a lens through which to see nature as an unruly agent that challenges Western development in epistemological and linguistic terms. Such an understanding of nature, Lyotard suggests, necessitates the deconstructive power of avant-garde art, especially literary writing, which Conrad’s 1899 text best prefigures. Set mainly in the wilderness of colonial Congo during the nineteenth century, the widely acknowledged postcolonial novella at once invites an ecocritical reading of how European developed culture struggles and eventually fails to prove mastery over African nature.

The horror of death: A Foucauldian reading of power relations in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now

Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899) addresses the brutality underlying Europe’s colonisation of Africa. Its film adaptation, Apocalypse Now (1979), shows the US Army’s radical practices in the Vietnam War. A comparative study of power relations on both works will help understand the workings of power in extreme sociopolitical circumstances devoid of a democratic environment. This article analyses both cultural products under the theoretical framework of Michel Foucault’s writings on power. Three conceptual nuclei where power relations emanate are scrutinised independently: imperialism and the resulting local resistance; internal hierarchies in colonial organisations; and the role of gender. The analysis shows that absolute power is intolerable, death its ultimate limit, and confession its main liberating mechanism.

The horror of death: A Foucauldian reading of power relations in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now

Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899) addresses the brutality underlying Europe’s colonisation of Africa. Its film adaptation, Apocalypse Now (1979), shows the US Army’s radical practices in the Vietnam War. A comparative study of power relations on both works will help understand the workings of power in extreme sociopolitical circumstances devoid of a democratic environment. This article analyses both cultural products under the theoretical framework of Michel Foucault’s writings on power. Three conceptual nuclei where power relations emanate are scrutinised independently: imperialism and the resulting local resistance; internal hierarchies in colonial organisations; and the role of gender. The analysis shows that absolute power is intolerable, death its ultimate limit, and confession its main liberating mechanism.

DE\GLOBALIZE

»Everywhere in the world where knowledge is suppressed - knowledge that, if it became conscious, would shock our view of the world and question ourselves - everywhere there the heart of darkness is taking place. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw the consequences from it.« Sven Lindqvist The artistic research cycle DE\GLOBALIZE is a media ecological search movement for the terrestrial. After examining matters of fact in India (2014-18), matters of concern in Egypt (2016-2019) and matters of care in the Upper Rhine (2018-22), the focus turns toward matters of violence in the Congo (2022). From matter to mater, mother-earth, the garden to exploitation. From science, water and climate to migration, oppression and extermination. The long-term research is accessible through interactive web documentation. The platform serves as a continuous media-archaeological archive for a speculative ethnography. The relational structure of the videographic essay is enabling the forensic processing of single documents in the sense of the actor-network theory. The subject of the presentation at IFM is a field trip to the Congo planned for March 2022, which will focus on the ambivalence of violence and care in collaboration with local artists. The field trip is based on the postcolonial reflection luderitzcargo by the author from 1996, in which a freight container was transformed into a translocal cinema in Namibia. Through the journey to Congo, a group of media artists, a psychotherapist, a theater dramaturg, a filmmaker and a philosopher intend to explore the political, technological and psycho-geographic borders. By artistic interventions with locals, we want to interfere with relational string figures as part of the new Earth Politics. They are focusing on the displaced consumption of resources which are hard-fought and guarantee prosperity in the global north. The so-called ghost acreages are repressed and justified as part of a civilizational mission. With this trip, we want to confront our self-lies with the ones of our hosts. We want to confront ourselves with the foreign, the dark and the displaced ghosts within ourselves. In the presentation at the #IFM2022 Conference, the platform DE\GLOBALIZE will be problematized itself as an example of epistemic violence for the ethnographic memory of (Western) knowledge. We are not the missionaries but the perplexed travellers. In our search movement, we are dealing with psychoanalysis, video, performance and trance. As disoriented white men we try the reversal of Black Skin and White Mask by Franz Fanon without blackfacing. We will not only care about the sensitivity of our skin but that of our g/hosts and the one of mother earth.

(Anti)Colonial Anti-Communism in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl: Appropriating the Anti-Colonial Rhetoric of Heart of Darkness and F.E.A.R. to Criticize Soviet Communism

This article analyses the anti-communist rhetoric of the popular Ukrainian video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl which was developed by GSC Game World and released in 2007. In this paper I argue that, in order to mount a humanist critique against Soviet communism, the game borrows the anti-colonial discursive structure of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness filtered through the video game F.E.A.R. If colonialism is predicated on the juxtaposition of territorial expansion and a progressive temporality towards a civilizational ideal, then Heart of Darkness and F.E.A.R. convey a critique of colonialism by highlighting how spatial progress brings about temporal regression manifested as a dissolution of the self. To show this, they employ the doppelgänger convention. Both protagonists representing white civilization are on quest to find a character who has been ‘contaminated’ by the ‘heart of darkness.’ This latter character is eventually revealed to be a negative cultural doppelgänger of the protagonist who has assimilated otherness to the point of no return. By the same token, in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl the psychological regression of the protagonist is mapped onto spatial progress towards the heart of communism, in this case Reactor #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. reworks the doppelgänger convention by identifying the protagonist with the character ‘gone native,’ i.e. gone communist, not only symbolically, but also physically. This enables the game to put forth two scenarios, namely one where the main character overcomes communism, and one where he embraces it. By offering both endings, the game maintains two contradictory views on the communist past. One ending suggests that communism can eventually be overcome, while the other postulates the communist past is here to stay.

Revisiting Characters in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: Binarism, Trauma and Resilience

For decades, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) has been subject to different readings and interpretations. Transcending the boundaries of time and place, Conrad’s novella is still a relevant text for modern critical readings. Although many critics have studied characters referring to different theories and perspectives, characterization is still a rich source of meaning. This paper aims to study the characters in Heart of Darkness and examine Conrad’s narrative strategy in terms of binarism and doubling. The paper also explores how, despite their depiction as powerful characters, Marlow and Kurtz show symptoms of failure and trauma while the black female character, usually depicted as an emblem of absence and negation, shows signs of power and resilience despite her muteness and minor presence. Feminist, Psychoanalytical and trauma theories are referred to in the revisiting of characters in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

The Textual Apparatus of Empire in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Abstract This essay argues that the collapse of Empire in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is troped as the erosion of textuality. Five key instances of this textual collapse occur in the novel: the maps Marlow reads as a child, the accounting books, the seaman’s manual, the Kurtz Report and the Company papers. There are also a few minor instances of similar textual collapses, which also come to attention here. The essay notes that in each case the text’s significance is lost or altered in specific ways, and this contributes to the erosion of the authority of the text.

What Does Western White Prose Fiction Teach the Woke Generation About Othering and Belonging?

This research explores the portrayal of otherness and non-conformity in Western literature and proves that modern phenomena such as “cancel culture” are giving contemporary authors a new relevance. Using William Faulkner’s Light in August and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as my foundation, I intend to demonstrate that the lessons they provide on race, gender, and extremism are often ignored by Generation Z, yet applicable to modern discourse. By referencing earlier works including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well as George Orwell’s dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, I want to prove that the warnings given about the consequences of trying to eradicate otherness are multi-dimensional and deeply entrenched. Ultimately, my research illustrates that despite the societal tendency to make distinctions between normative and “other”, the line between the two is non-existent: in attempts to eliminate otherness, we become violent "others" ourselves, possessing characteristics to the “bestial” individual that we originally sought to oppress.

La puissante écriture intertextuelle de Marie Darrieussecq dans Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes

In 2010 Marie Darrieussecq published Rapport de Police, Accusations de plagiat et autres modes de surveillance de la fiction as a response to the accusations of plagiarism brought against her by Camille Laurens and Marie NDiaye. In this essay she claims her right to an openly intertextual writing. Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes belongs to this type of writing: Darrieussecq draws strong images from other texts to renew and extend them. In particular, she reworks certain topoi, such as love at first sight, heterosexual passion, and White-Black relations. Her main intertexts are Passion simple by Annie Ernaux, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and Apocalypse Now, the film that Francis Ford Coppola made from it. She also uses several texts by Marguerite Duras, as well as songs, proverbs, key sentences, and anecdotes. She thus explores many clichés, including those relating to two legendary places, Hollywood and Africa. This rich intertextuality could have led to the dilution of her own voice if she had not also anchored her text in her own experience, by including the discreet presence of an auctorial I, and by ensuring through a large epitext that the autobiographical comparisons with its protagonist Solange are known as well as the fact that her text was also born from personal research on Africa and Hollywood. With Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes, Darrieussecq has written a powerful and personal text despite, or rather thanks to, its vast intertextuality.

Dorothy Thompson and American Zionism

“If only one could say, and dismiss it with that, ‘These people are savages.’ They are—but they are a new and terrifying kind of savage. The twentieth century and the white civilized world produced this savage.”1 –Dorothy Thompson, “The Lessons of Dachau,” Ladies Home Journal, September 1945 When the readers of the Ladies Home Journal turned to Thompson’s article, after paging through columns offering housekeeping and beauty advice, they faced a somber shift in tone in the journalist’s descriptions of the Dachau concentration camp. Thompson’s problematic language about civilization, race, and savagery echoed the themes of a novel by one of her favorite authors, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which described another genocidal atrocity at the hands of white Belgians in the Congo. In 1941 she had lamented the shortcomings of journalism to fully represent the war and expressed hope that it would produce “a Victor Hugo,...

RACE AND EMPIRE: A DECONSTRUCTIONIST READING OF JOSEPH CONRAD’S HEART OF DARKNESS AND EDWARD MORGAN FORSTER’S A PASSAGE TO INDIA

The emergence of deconstruction as literary theory and criticism in the 1960s changed the understanding and of the relationship between text and meaning creation and formation. In his own theory, Jacques Derrida argues that there are no self-sufficient units of meaning in a literary text, because individual words or sentences in a text can only properly be understood in terms of how they fit into the larger structure of the text and language itself. This article examines race and empire and their relations of binary opposition in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Edward Morgan Forster’s A Passage to India through deconstructionist approach. The study sees how these texts are racial and imperial in theme and to explore these themes in relations of binary oppositions like, light/dark, white/black, good/evil, and civilization/savagery as they represent racial ideology and self/other, colonizer/colonized and civilization/savagery as imperial ideology in Heart of Darkness and good/evil, white/ black, superior/inferior, civilization/savagery reflecting racial ideology and self/other, colonizer/colonized and west/east as imperial ideology in A Passage to India. In deconstructing the above major binary oppositions, the manifestations and conflicts of racial and imperial ideological paradigms; hence rendering both texts destabilizes themselves with the absence of determinate meaning.

Memory, Identity and Narrative: Conrad’s <i>Heart of Darkness</i> and Siegfried Sassoon’s “Glory of Women” as Paradigms and Depositories of British Cultural Memory and Collective Identity

This study investigates the representations of memory in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Siegfried Sassoon’s “Glory of Women” with the aim of demonstrating that the two works teem with versions of collective remembering in the form of genres, linguistic parameters, ideological and cultural discourses, images and metaphors of history (what critics call “historiographic metafiction” understood to mean writing history in arts); mythical and travel narratives that can attract the attention of creative writers, critics, and researchers interested in reproducing or exploring the interconnection of cultural memory, collective identity and narrative (narratological) aspects of literary texts. Focusing on the representations of memory in these two texts, and using the narratological aspect of perspectivity or focalization, this paper answers the questions: Whose memory and which versions of the past are transmitted from generations to generation through these “fictions of Memory”? What (narrative) approaches are available for research focusing on memory cultures within literary studies? What functions do the texts fulfil as repositories/depositories of British cultural memory and identity? It emerges from the study that the two texts are paradigms and depositories of British cultural memory and collective identity.

The Nature of Hate and the Hatred of Nature in Hispanic Literatures by Beatriz Rivera-Barnes

Reviewed by: The Nature of Hate and the Hatred of Nature in Hispanic Literatures by Beatriz Rivera-Barnes William Flores Rivera-Barnes, Beatriz. The Nature of Hate and the Hatred of Nature in Hispanic Literatures. Lexington Books, 2021. Pp. 235. ISBN 978-1-498-59648-0. The Nature of Hate and the Hatred of Nature in Hispanic Literatures is an impressive multidisciplinary collection of eleven insightful chapters that converge on the unifying themes of hate and ecophobia in major literary and cinematic works produced in the Spanish-speaking world. The first part of the book contains three chapters related to the Iberian world, while the second part encompasses eight chapters referring to Latin American film and literature. The introduction provides a rich discussion on ecocritical theory that includes Simon C. Estok’s view on ecophobia and a synthesis of Timothy Morton’s theory of dark ecology, to help the reader understand the ecocritical approximation of the book. Furthermore, the introduction provides a valuable academic discussion on what hate and the hatred of nature are, while using a historiographical approach that includes an examination of biblical narratives, medieval events and literature, and current ecocatastrophes. For those interested in Spanish Golden Age literature, the first chapter investigates psycho-philosophical elements in Fernando de Roja’s La Celestina. The chapter presents hate as an intrinsic component of the characters’ self, being generated by love in the form of an excessively manifested passion. Concurrently, the second chapter explores the hate that comes from intimacy as portrayed in Lope de Vega’s La creación del Mundo, El robo de Dina, Fuenteovejuna, and El castigo sin venganza. The chapter highlights how these adaptations of the stories of Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Amnon raping Tamar, or the rape of Dinah exemplify the propagation of hate through generations. The third chapter studies Miguel de Unamuno’s Abel Sánchez, a work based on the biblical story of Cain and Abel. This chapter provides a reading of that book as a representation of the hate that comes from the God of the Old Testament, human hate, and the resulting curse of nature. By examining narrative techniques that include stream of consciousness and introspective mono-dialogues, chapter three highlights that hate results from intimacy and is catalyzed by an envy that consumes, devours, and destroys humans and their natural environment. Utilizing an eclectic approach, the fourth chapter studies a variety of cinematic and literary texts that describe Lope de Aguirre’s search for El Dorado and Cabeza de Vaca’s foundering in the Florida Everglades. The chapter examines films including Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God, Carlos Saura’s El Dorado, Roland Joffe’s The Mission, Nicolás Echevarría’s Cabeza de Vaca, Icíar Bollaín’s También la Lluvia, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, in addition to literary works such as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Cabeza de Vaca’s Chronicle of the Narvaez Expedition, Rivera’s La vorágine, and a selection of jungle tales written by Horacio Quiroga. This chapter successfully examines and portrays these works as “doomed expeditions” that reflect hatred for nature in an existing, created, or re-created form. The fifth chapter explores hate while examining Alonso Carrió’s Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes, and Ernesto Guevara’s Diarios de motocicleta and Otra vez. This chapter is a pleasure to read as it presents, in rich narrative style, how these literary works can be juxtaposed while analyzing journeys that explore the Latin American reality of corruption and abuse. Rivera-Barnes connects the corruption and exploitation from colonial times as presented in Carrió’s Lazarillo with the abuses of neocolonialism exposed in Che Guevara’s narratives to provide a canvas of the continuity of colonialism and its foundational hatred of indigenous peoples and their natural environment. Furthermore, in the case of Che Guevara’s accounts, hatred is also examined as a tool to fight oppression. [End Page 149] Using a historical approach, the sixth chapter studies twentieth-century narratives written by Alejo Carpentier, Manuel Zapata Olivella, and Enrique Buenaventura, to explore literary representations of hatred that portray the 1791 rebellion in Haiti and the making of Haiti...

Whispers of Racism: Analyzing Critical Responses of Chinua Achebe and Edward Said to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

This paper explores how African people are viewed and presented in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and how this author is charged with racism by Chinua Achebe after fifty years of writing this much-debated text. It also clarifies Edward Said’s critical response to this novella which is considered as a defense of Conrad. Analysing both the responses of Said and Achebe, this research tends to assess Achebe’s allegation objectively and non-judgmentally situating the text more as a product of time than as an instance of racist tale. This paper presents an idea that the authors of postcolonial literature are literally driven to analyze the multi-layered aspects of race and racism that have accelerated a flow of postcolonial novels based on the concept of race, color, sex, and identity. However, this paper also suggests that the presence of race and racism in literary studies occur instinctively and effortlessly although the early responses to Heart of Darkness simply ignored that idea because the literary critics and scholars of that period hardly talked about racism.