Download or read book Conrad s Destructive Element written by Kenneth B. Newell and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a new interpretation of Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim based on readings from not only its published text but also its principal manuscript text. Extensive use of the manuscript text has not been a feature of any other work on Lord Jim, and such use helps bring into focus a fixed pattern of meaning and an implicit unity that Conrad said the novel has. This result controverts not only postmodern critics, who say that the novel lacks any fixed pattern of meaning, but almost all critics since its publication, who have said that it lacks unity—specifically, that it separates into two halves, the Patna half and the Patusan half. However, with the help of the manuscript text, a detailed interpretation extending over the whole of Lord Jim shows it to be a unified whole. As Conrad wrote to his publisher four days after completing the novel, it is “the development of one situation, only one really from beginning to end.” Most recent Lord Jim criticism discusses the novel from a standpoint critical of the author and in political or epistemological terms, whereas the present book discusses it from a standpoint sympathetic to the author and in symbolic and metaphysical terms. The metaphysical question that pervades the novel and helps unify it is whether the “destructive element” that is the “spirit” of the Universe has intention—and, beyond that, malevolent intention—toward any particular individual or is, instead, indiscriminate, impartial, and indifferent. Depending (as a corollary) on the answer to that question is the degree to which the particular individual can be judged responsible for what he does or does not do. Variant responses to the question or its corollary are provided not only by several characters and voices in Lord Jim but also by a letter of Conrad’s and by excerpts from works by Arthur Schopenhauer, Thomas Hardy, James Thomson (“B. V.”), and John Stuart Mill. The present book is written in a lay vocabulary free of the diction of postmodern theory and so would be understandable to non-academic as well as academic readers. It is intended for anyone interested in gaining a coherent nonpolitical understanding of Lord Jim.
Download or read book The Destructive Element written by Lyndsey Stonebridge and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Conrad s Models of Mind written by Bruce Johnson and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1971-07-14 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conrad's Models of Mind was first published in 1971. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In a new approach to understanding the psychological assumptions that lie behind the creation of a work of fiction, Professor Johnson analyzes a number of Joseph Conrad's novels and short stories, identifying and explaining Conrad's changing conceptions or models of mind. As he points out in his introduction: "Every writer makes assumptions about the nature of the mind, whether they may be elaborate theories, metaphors that seem simple but imply a great deal, downright beliefs, or vague gestalten. And such assumptions color his whole creation, the way his characters think and feel and react, possibly even his choice of subject matter." The author traces Conrad's steady progression away from deductive psychology, involving such entities as will, passion, ego, or sympathy, toward a flexible, and, for the period, new psychology that had implications for his entire development as a writer. Professor Johnson finds certain affinities between Conrad's models of mind and those of a number of other writers, among them, Schopenhauer, Sartre, and Pascal. He shows that one aspect of Conrad's psychology was closely allied to the Schopenhauerian concept of will but that when he wrote Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo Conrad moved toward an existential concept of self-image and self-creation similar to Sartre's psychology in Being and Nothingness. Finally, Professor Johnson examines Conrad's novel The Rescue and shows how hopeless it was for Conrad to return to earlier conceptions of mind after he had explored the new existential models.
Download or read book The True Story of the Novel written by Margaret Anne Doody and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An erudite, intelligent and imaginative work of literary scholarship. With vivacity, grace, and wit, Doody traces the history (of the novel) from the ancient novels of Apuleium and Heliodorus through the Renaissance fictions of Boccaccio, Cervantes, and Rabelais to the 'official' birth of the novel in 18th-century England".--BOSTON GLOBE. 39 illustrations.
Download or read book A Preface to Conrad written by Cedric, M.A. Ph.D. (Professor) Watts and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-20 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely recommended, this guide to Conrad offers a vivid and incisive account of his life and literary career, and gives detailed attention to the contexts, themes, problems and paradoxes of his works.
Download or read book Stephen Spender written by John Sutherland and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-06 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the leading poets and cultural icons of the 20th century, Stephen Spender was a prominent writer, literary critic, and social commentator--and close friend of some of the best-know creative talents of his day. Now, in this penetrating biography, John Sutherland paints a vivid portrait of Spender and of the glittering literary world of which he was a part, drawing on exclusive access to Spender's private papers. This briskly paced, compelling narrative illuminates the vast range of Spender's literary, political, and artistic interests. We follow Spender from childhood to his days at Oxford (where he first became friends with W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Isaiah Berlin); to his meteoric rise as poet in the 1930s, while still in his twenties; to his later years as cultural statesman, at home in both Britain and America. We witness many of the century's defining moments through Spender's eyes: the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Cold War, the 1960s sexual revolution, and the rise of America as a cultural force. And along the way, we are introduced to many of Spender's accomplished friends, including Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Cecil Day-Lewis, Joseph Brodsky, Lucian Freud, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot. Perhaps most important, Sutherland has been granted exclusive access to Spender's private papers by his wife Natasha Spender. Thus he is able to provide a far more intimate look at the poet's personal life than has appeared in previous biographies. Featuring 36 unpublished photographs, Stephen Spender: A Literary Life throws light not only on this supremely gifted writer, but also on the literary and social history of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Joseph Conrad Today written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Self Analysis in Literary Study written by Daniel Rancour-Laferriere and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1994-10-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes one reader look for issues of social conformity in Kafka's Metamorphosis while another concentrates on the relationship between Gregor Samsa and his father? Self-Analysis in Literary Study investigates how the psychoanalytic self-analysis enables readers to gain a deeper understanding of literature as well as themselves. In the past scholars have largely ignored self-analysis as an aid to approaching literature. The contributors in Self-Analysis in Literary Study boldly explore how the psyche affects intellectual intellectual discovery in the realm of applied psychoanalysis. Jeffrey Berman confronts a close friend's suicide through Camus and his student's diaries, kept for an English class. Language, family history, and an attachment to Kafka are addressed in David Bleich's essay. Barbara Ann Schapiro writes of her attraction to Virginia Woolf during her emotional senior year of college. Other essayists include Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, Norman N. Holland, Bernard J. Paris, Steven Rosen, and Michael Steig. Written for both scholars in the fields of psychology and literature and for a general audience intrigued by self- analysis as a tool for gaining insight, Self-Analysis in Literary Study answers traditional questions about literature and raises challenging new ones.
Download or read book Joseph Conrad written by Jacques Berthoud and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1978 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the importance of Conrad's work has long been recognized, Jacques Berthoud attempts a full demonstration of the clarity, consistency, and depth of thought evident in the novels written during the first decade of this century. Instead of the standard versions of Conrad - from sceptical moralizer to 'metaphysician of darkness' - he offers a tragic novelist, engaged in a sustained exploration of the contradictions inherent in man's relations with his fellows; and from the perspective thus achieved, he is able to show why Conrad occupies a leading place among the creators of modern literature. This book will be of interest to specialists in English studies because it seeks to make a substantial contribution to the critical debate on the significance of Conrad's work. It will also appeal to any reader looking for guidance through the complexities of the major novels: the central issues have been presented as simply as the originality of Conrad's art and thought permits.
Download or read book Exotic Memories written by and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1991-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the literature of exoticism at the turn of the last century and how it foreshadows our own fin de siècle. Earlier writers of exoticism had turned away from the West and its modernity, rejecting the social changes caused by industrialization and displacing onto 'savage' or 'primitive' cultures their aspirations for political freedom. By the turn of the century, however, European nations had reduced vast areas of the globe to colonial status: this global exportation of Western cultural norms and economic systems had a critical effect on the literature of exoticism. In concentrating on writers from the age of the New Imperialism (1880-1920), this book reveals an important contradiction at the heart of the exoticist impulse: the very expansion that enabled European writers to go in search of exotic Others ensured the eventual disappearance of the exotic. Turn-of-the-century writers of exoticism thus give voice to a deep nostalgia both for the values supposedly lost to the West in its process of modernization and for those once exotic places in which they found, with increasing disappointment, not pristine innocence but merely the traces of their own culture. The author concentrates on four writers - Jules Verne, Pierre Loti, Victor Segalen, and Joseph Conrad - although he touches on a number of other writers, and even painters, like Paul Gauguin. The works of these four writers foreground attitudes and assumptions useful for understanding a wide array of phenomena: an examination of these works shows how nostalgia for a cultural Other was built into the intellectual configuration of modernism, throws light on the early history of anthropology, and helps us understand features of our own cultural formation that are becoming increasingly important in today's global village. Making an explicit link between turn-of-the-century exoticism and the present day, the book concludes with a critical assessment of Pier Paolo Pasolini's neo-exoticist attachment to a supposedly revolutionary Third World in his poetry and literary criticism. The book's critical stance is noteworthy, drawing its basic assumptions from pensiero debole, the 'weak thought' of the contemporary Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, whose poststructuralist theories are only now becoming known in the United States. 'Weak thought' seeks to supersede outmoded, metaphysical categories of thought, not by replacing them with something new, but by an elegaic, recollective, and rhetorical dwelling within those categories. The author also makes creative use of narrative theory, and draws on the recent 'new historicism', reading literary texts to excellent effect against the historical events that made them possible.
Download or read book Conrad and Theory written by Gibson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-11-27 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Under Conrad s Eyes written by Michael John DiSanto and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2009-04-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joseph Conrad's novels are recognized as great works of fiction, but they should also be counted as great works of criticism. A voracious reader throughout his life, Conrad wrote novels that question and transform the ideas he encountered in non-fiction, novels, and scientific and philosophic works. Under Conrad's Eyes looks at Conrad's revaluations of some of his important nineteenth-century predecessors - Carlyle, Darwin, Dickens, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche. Detailed readings of works from Heart of Darkness to Victory explore Conrad's language and style, focusing on questions regarding the will to know and the avoidance of knowledge, the potential harmfulness of sympathy, and the competing instincts for self-preservation and self-destruction. Comparative analyses show how Conrad transforms aspects of Bleak House into The Secret Agent and Middlemarch into Nostromo. Especially compelling are explorations of Conrad's ambivalence towards Carlyle's faith in work and hero-worship as rejuvenators of English culture and his views on Nietzsche's assault on Christianity. This important new study of a novelist of profound contemporary relevance demonstrates how Conrad exemplifies the artist as critic while challenging both the categories we impose on texts and the boundaries we erect between literary periods.
Download or read book Disappointment written by Michael Mack and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considering the support behind Brexit and Donald Trump's 'America first' policies, this book challenges the idea that they are motivated solely by fear and instead looks at the hope and promises that drive these renewed forms of nationalism. Addressing these neglected motivations within contemporary populism, Michael Mack explores how our current sense of disappointment with our ecological, economic and political state of affairs partakes of a history of failed promises that goes back to the inception of modernity; namely, to Spinoza's radical enlightenment of diversity and equality. Through this innovative approach, Spinoza emerges less as a single isolated figure and more as a sign for an intellectual constellation of thinkers and writers who – from the romantics to contemporary theory and literature – have introduced various shifts in the way we see humanity as being limited and prone to disappointment. Combining intellectual history with literary and scientific theory, the book traces the collapse of traditional values and orders from Spinoza to Nietzsche and then to the literary modernism of Joseph Conrad and postmodernism of Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon.
Download or read book Marang written by University of Botswana. Writers Workshop and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Conrad s Fiction as Critical Discourse written by Richard Ambrosini and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1991-07-26 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joseph Conrad's comments about his works have commonly been dismissed as theoretically unsophisticated, while the critical notions of James, Woolf and Joyce have come to shape our understanding of the modern novel. Richard Ambrosini's study of Conrad's Fiction as Critical Discourse makes an original claim for the importance of his theoretical ideas as they are formed, tested, and eventually redefined in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Setting the narrator's discourse in these tales in the context of the dynamic interplay of Conrad's fictional with his non-fictional writings, and of the transformations in his narrative forms, Ambrosini defines Conrad's view of fiction and the artistic ideal underlying his commitment as a writer in a new and challenging way. Conrad's innovatory techniques as a novelist are shown in the continuity of his theoretical enterprise, from the early search for an artistic prose and a personal novel form, to the later dislocations of perspective achieved by manipulation of conventions drawn from popular fiction. This reassessment of Conrad's critical thought offers a new perspective on the transition from the Victorian novel to contemporary fiction.
Download or read book The Portable Conrad written by Joseph Conrad and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-11-27 with total page 756 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of Conrad's most enduring work, edited by Pulitzer Prize finalist Michael Gorra A great novelist of the sea, a poet of the tropics, a critic of empire and analyst of globalization, a harbinger of the modern spy novel, an unparalleled observer of the moments in which people are stripped of their illusions-Joseph Conrad is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. This revised edition of The Portable Conrad features the best known and most enduring of Conrad's works, including The Secret Agent, Heart of Darkness, and The Nigger of the "Narcissus," as well as shorter tales like "Amy Forster" and "The Secret Sharer," a selection of letters, and his observations on the sinking of the Titanic. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Download or read book Conrad Autobiographical Remembering and the Making of Narrative Identity written by Xiaoling Yao and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-24 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on recent studies on life writing, memory, the narrative turn, and psychology, Conrad, Autobiographical Remembering, and the Making of Narrative Identity is the first major work that extensively explores the dynamic interplay between Conrad’s autobiographical remembering and storytelling in relation to his identity construction within a historical and cultural context. This unique perspective makes the book particularly attractive for students, teachers, and researchers of Conrad. Contrary to the prevalent "achievement-and-decline" paradigm that implies a decline in quality of Conrad’s works in his later period, this volume contends that Conrad’s later works continue to engage with the complex questions of memory, identity, and culture, demonstrating a sustained commitment to exploring the intricacies of the human experiences. Essential reading for Conrad enthusiasts, but also for those who seek to explore how memory studies in literature intersect with psychology, philosophy, and cultural studies.
