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In this re-evaluation of the writings of Joseph Conrad, Michael Greaney places language and narrative at the heart of his literary achievement. A trilingual Polish expatriate, Conrad brought a formidable linguistic self-consciousness to the English novel; tensions between speech and writing are the defining obsessions of his career. He sought very early on to develop a 'writing of the voice' based on oral or communal modes of storytelling. Greaney argues that the 'yarns' of his nautical raconteur Marlow are the most challenging expression of this voice-centred aesthetic. But Conrad's suspicion that words are fundamentally untrustworthy is present in everything he wrote. The political novels of his middle period represent a breakthrough from traditional storytelling into the writerly aesthetic of high modernism. Greaney offers an examination of a wide range of Conrad's work which combines recent critical approaches to language in post-structuralism with an impressive command of linguistic theory.
Opens up the rich topic of Joseph Conrad's complex relationship with languageJoseph Conrad was, famously, trilingual in Polish, French and English, and was also familiar with German, Russian, Dutch and Malay. He was also a consummate stylist, using words with the precision of a poet in his fiction.The essays in this collection examine his engagement with specific lexical sets and terminology - maritime language, the language of terror, and abstract language; issues of linguistic communication - speech, hearing, and writing; and his relationship to specific languages - his deployment of foreign languages, his decision to write in English, and his reception through translation. The collection closes with an Afterword by renowned Conrad scholar, Laurence Davies.Key FeaturesThe first academic and critical study wholly devoted to the topic of Conrad and language, and the first to address that topic from a diversity of critical approachesSpeaks to a range of current trends in literary criticism including transnationalism, lateness, translation studies, terrorism and disabilities studiesComprises newly commissioned essays by leading and emerging Conrad scholars from around the world, employing a variety of approaches including philosophy, psychoanalytical theory, biographical theory, as well as textually driven readings
Werner Senn’s Conrad’s Narrative Voice draws on the methodology of linguistic stylistics and the analysis of narrative discourse to discuss Joseph Conrad’s perception of the role and the limitations of language. Tracing recurrent linguistic patterns allows Senn to demonstrate that Conrad’s view of the radical indeterminacy of the world is conveyed on the most basic levels of the author’s (often criticised) verbal style but permeates his work at all levels of the narrative. Detailed stylistic analysis also reveals the importance, to Conrad, of the spoken word, of oral communication. Senn argues that the narrators’ compulsive efforts to make their readers see and understand reflect Conrad’s ethics of human solidarity in a world he depicts as hostile, enigmatic and often senseless.
Beginning with a detailed discussion of Conrad's ambivalence toward the function of language and the meaning of fiction, Ted Billy explores the problematical sense of an ending in Conrad's tales and novellas. Billy demonstrates that Conrad's endings, instead of reinforcing the meaning of the narrative or lending finality, actually provide a contrasting perspective that clashes with the narrative's general drift.
Reading Conrad's fiction alongside the work of Benjamin Blanchot, Derrida, and Heidegger, and offering an investigation into the connection between narrative and death, this book argues that Marlow's essence is located in his liminality and that the meaning in his stories is at all points bound up with the process of his storytelling.
Originally published in 1986, this is a powerful and original book. It offers textual interpretation of Conrad’s major work and articulates the subtlety and richness of his treatment of social-political institutions and of the forces that complicate and distort private and public life. Suresh Raval argues that the social-personal relations in Conrad’s fiction cannot be conceived apart from their existence in the political life of a community; but at the same time they cannot be accommodated institutionally. The author’s concern is with the problematic status of the self under various perspectives: experience and understanding (Heart of Darkness), an ethical ideal (Lord Jim), history (Nostromo), ideology (The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes), scepticism (Victory). What the self is remains ambiguous and elusive. Conrad’s fiction is concerned with exhibiting the failure of language, but always as a result of an immense effort of language itself. As language undoes itself in the act of seeking utterance, so Conrad’s fictional mode – romance – turns into the opposite of itself as it unfolds. Raval demonstrates that incompatible alternatives – intention and action, thought and experience, the individual and the social, the logical and the contingent – are entangled with each other, and how this entanglement works in the fiction. Raval’s exploration of Conrad’s scepticism shows why Conrad cannot be characterized as a political conservative or radical without distorting the complexity and seriousness of his reflection on society. For his scepticism is the product not just of intelligence but of intelligence conscious of its limitations, and is thus able to make a devastating critique of the nihilism sometimes attributed to Conrad by critics. Only those who think that morality has to have a secure single foundation if it is to be real are pushed into regarding Conrad’s scepticism as a form of nihilism. Professor Raval’s important study brings philosophical and literary interests to bear on Conrad’s major fiction and illuminates those aspects of his art which have puzzled and fascinated his readers. It will be deservedly valued by those studying and teaching modern literature.