Made available in DSpace on 2013-08-07T19:01:56Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 000401707-Texto+Completo-0.pdf: 1827822 bytes, checksum: 1e98105c733bff382354f6d48265364a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent was first published in 1907 and has been read and debated – especially by scholars – since then due to its unique literary techniques and approach on the subject of espionage, politics and domestic drama. In the 9/11 aftermath, however, The Secret Agent was rediscovered as a "prophetic text", since its plot contains disturbingly familiar elements to us. To enlist some: a group of men who hate the modern capitalist society and wishes to destroy it; a conspiracy targeting a main symbol of such society; an outrage made with "destructive ferocity so absurd as to be incomprehensible"; a terrorist who walks by the streets seeking for an opportunity to blow himself and anyone around. Such elements, despite of their temporal distance of a hundred years from the release of Conrad's book, send us in a questioning not only about the usual literary subjects – plot, narrator, style – but also in a sociological and historical perspective between ours and Conrad’s turn-of-the-century perceptions. In order to analyze the novel in such perspectives, a multidisciplinary approach was used. It led us to conclude that "The Secret Agent" describes extremely human and universal feelings and behaviors that surpass any ordinary historical or sociological categorizations, reaching a deep and dreadful truth about timeless human nature. / O agente secreto de Joseph Conrad foi publicado pela primeira vez em 1907 e, desde então, foi lido e debatido - principalmente por estudiosos da literatura - devido a sua técnica literária única e ao tratamento dado pela narrativa a temas como a espionagem, política e drama familiar. Após os atentados do "Onze de Setembro", entretanto, O agente secreto foi redescoberto sob uma perspectiva "profética", uma vez que seu enredo contém elementos tristemente familiares para nós: um grupo de homens que odeiam a moderna sociedade capitalista e desejam destruí-la; uma conspiração para atacar um dos principais símbolos dessa sociedade; um atentado com uma "ferocidade destrutiva tão absurda quanto incompreensível"; um terrorista que vaga pelas ruas em busca de uma oportunidade para explodir a sim mesmo e todos em torno. Tais elementos, a despeito de escritos há cem anos, nos remetem a uma busca não apenas sobre os elementos literários de praxe – enredo, narração, estilo – mas numa perspectiva histórica e sociológica entre a percepção da nossa virada de século (XXI) e aquela da época de Conrad (XX). Para completar essa busca, servimo-nos de uma abordagem multidisciplinar. Concluímos que O agente secreto descreve ações e sentimentos de extrema humanidade e universalidade. Tais ações e sentimentos ultrapassam classificações históricas e sociais e também revelam algumas das profundas e terríveis verdades sobre a atemporal natureza humana.

Cette thèse de doctorat n’a pas visé à établir « le » sens du texte. Au contraire, elle a cherché à concevoir le pluriel du texte par l’intermédiaire du concept lacanien d’objet a (objet petit a). Ce dernier ne peut être saisi que par l’intermédiaire de ses effets. En tant qu’objets partiels, la voix, le regard et le style sont des figurations métonymiques de l’objet a.Certes, il est patent que le concept d’objet a a constitué l’ossature logique de nos analyses littéraires, mais ces analyses ont été tout sauf pures. Assurément, nous nous sommes fréquemment référés à des concepts psychanalytiques, toutefois nous nous sommes souvent permis d’orienter nos recherches vers d’autres approches (philosophique, générique, idéologique, structurale, rythmique, stylistique, etc.).L’étude des Trois Contes de Gustave Flaubert et les Tales of Unrest de Joseph Conrad nous a donné l’occasion de mettre au jour l’existence de deux forces : d’une part, la force qui concerne la parole, l’œil et le style comme objet du désir de maîtrise de l’écrivain-artisan ; d’autre part, la force qui relève de la voix, du regard et du style comme « signifiance », c’est-à-dire comme « travail radical (il ne laisse rien intact) à travers lequel le sujet explore comment la langue le travaille et le défait dès lors qu’il y entre ». / This doctoral thesis has not aimed at establishing “the” meaning of the text. On the contrary, it has sought to conceive the plurality of the text through Lacan’s concept of objet petit a (object small a). The latter can be grasped only through its effects. As part-objects, voice, gaze, and style are metonymic figurations of objet petit a.Admittedly, it is patently obvious that the object a has constituted the logical framework of our literary analyses, but these analyses have been anything but pure ones. Of course, we have frequently referred to psychoanalytic concepts, however, we have often permitted ourselves to orient our investigation towards other approaches (philosophical, generic, ideological, structural, rhythmical, stylistic etc.).The study of two collection of tales by two different authors – Trois Contes by Gustave Flaubert and Joseph Conrad’s Tales of Unrest – has been the occasion to bring to light the existence of two forces: on the one hand, the force which concerns speech, eye, and style as the object of the desire of the writer as a craftsman, and, on the other, the force which pertains to voice, gaze, and style as a signifying production (signifiance), i.e. as “radical work (which leaves nothing intact) through which the subject explores how language works him and undoes him as soon as he stops observing it and enters it”.

The aim of this study is to compare metaphors from the 1970 edition of Joseph Conrsd's Heart of Darkness (originally published in 1902) with their Swedish translations in Mörkrets Hjärta, by Einar Hecksher (2006), to see how mwtaphors have been translated from English into Swedish, i.e. to see if there are any structural differences which cause semantic differences to the metaphors. By comparing the original metaphors with their translations, it is possible to point to difficulties, which may cause problems in the translation process. One example indicates that homonyms can be a problem. Nearly all of the English metaphors have been translated as metaphors in Swedish as well. About half of the metaphors studied have been semantically changed in their translations, yet without any pragmatic differences compared to the originals. It seems not that important which theory about metaphors (e.g. Lakoff, Leech, Levinson, Black) is more 'applicable' than the others with regard to translation. The result of translation of metaphors is more likely due to the translator's perception of the source language, rather than to theories about metaphors per se.

Summary This essay examines how Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness and Hunter S. Thompson's novel The Rum Diary portray´s the effects of colonialism and neocolonialism in Africa and Puerto Rico. Using postcolonial theory, the essay shows how Conrad's and Thompson´s complex images of the Europeans and Africans, Westerners and Puertoricans stand in contrast to orientalistic and racist images of the colonial natives. The thesis discusses responsibility and guiltissues in the colonial states and analyses how Conrad and Thompson raise questions about these topics when they chose to portray the suffering among the colonial natives. Furthermore, the essay discusses how Conrad's and Thompson's many images of violence can be seen as images of a brutal reality carried out in countries marked by colonialism. Based on intertextual literary theory, and in the light of the literary journalistic genre ""new journalism"", in which Thompson was active, the essay markes out The Rum Diary's intertextual references to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The essay argue that The Rum Diary's intertextual references to Heart of Darkness indicate to the reader that the novel belongs to a certain genre, and by this; link the novel to a literary system, codes and traditions already constructed by Conrad. The Rum Diay, that portrays the neocolonial era in the 1950's in the former U.S's colony Puerto Rico, is therefore to be understood in the light of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, even though it portrays an earlier era of colonialism. / Sammanfattning Sammanfattningsvis behandlar uppsatsen skildringar av kolonialismens och neokolonialismens verkningar i Joseph Conrads novell Heart of Darkness och i Hunter S. Thompsons roman The Rum Diary. Med utgångspunkt i den postkoloniala litteraturteorin och mot bakgrund av den historiska bilden av den koloniala världen granskar uppsatsen bland annat hur Conrad och Thompson valde att skildra kolonialistiska och neokolonialistiska maktstrukturer och samhälleliga missförhållanden. Uppsatsen granskar även kolonialismens orientalistiska och rasistiska bild av utomeuropén kontrasterat de respektive verkens komplexa skildringar av européer och afrikaner, västerlänningar och puertoricaner. Uppsatsen berör även frågan om västvärldens ansvar och skuld inför koloniernas och de forna koloniernas inhemska problematik samt belyser Conrad och Thompson framställningar av lokalbefolkningens lidanden. Vidare granskar uppsatsen våldets betydelse för kolonialismens etablering och hur de respektive verkens våldsskildringar kan ses berätta om en våldspräglad realitet i de länder som är märkta av kolonialismens verkningar. Uppsatsen belyser också The Rum Diarys litterära beröringspunkter och direkta referenser till Conrads Heart of Darkness med utgångspunkt i den intertextuella litteraturteorin och mot bakgrund av den litterära journalistiska genren ”"new journalism"” inom vilken Thompson var verksam i. Uppsatsen argumenterar för att Thompsons avsikt med de intertextuella referenserna var att indikera för läsaren om verkets genre, textens mening och sammanlänka det egna verket med det system, de koder och den tradition som Conrad sedan tidigare utstakat. Uppsatsen avslutats med ett intertextuellt perspektiv som med flera exempel visar hur The Rum Diary refererar till Conrads litterära produktion.

The works of Joseph Conrad and Jules Verne share a fascination with geography: concern with geographical issues made explicit in their non-fictional works is also implicit in their fiction. Unfortunately, limited knowledge of or interest in geographic theory on the part of the literary critic has made the relation between literature and geography a relatively unpopular focus; to redress the balance, it is necessary to outline briefly some of the ways in which geographical theory may usefully inform the practice of literary criticism. Areas to be introduced include geography and literature as spatial distribution, as spatial perception, as inscription on and description of the environment, as text, as cultural matrix. The above areas serve as a focus for the comparative analysis of a series of novels by Joseph Conrad and Jules Verne in which three issues are foregrounded: first, the interrelations between concentrated place and surrounding space in the sea-tales The Nigger of the Narcissus and Vingt mille lieues sous les mers; second, the reading and writing of cultural landscape in Heart of Darkness and Voyage au centre de la terre; third, the geopolitics of territory, boundary and landclaim in Lord Jim and L'lle mystérieuse. In each case, relevant geographical theory is drawn upon: in the first instance, the phenomenological notions of Yi-Fu Tuan and Edward Relph; in the second, the landscape evaluations of Carl Sauer and Courtice Rose; in the third, the geopolitical and politico-geographical definitions of Glassner, De Blij and Cohen. The first section (on The Nigger of the Narcissus and Vingt mille lieues sous les mers) explores the spatial notions of topophilia, placelessness and geometricity inherent in the relation between ship and sea. The second section (on Heart of Darkness and Voyage au centre de la terre) discusses the various connotations of landscape: cultural imprint (rewriting), false perspective (mis-reading), textual sign-system (encoding/decoding), which suggest that landscape can be interpreted as a controlling mechanism of and means of access to the text. The third section (on Lord Jim and L' Ile mystérieuse) outlines the geographical motifs of the two novels (division, (dis)possession, ascent and descent, etc.) and infers possible motives behind these motifs, relating topographical issues to personal and political ones and paying particular attention to the implications of island environments and communities and to the connections between imperialism, colonialism and narrative strategy. Finally, the 'literary geography' of Conrad's and Verne's novels is situated in its historical context and related particularly to the late nineteenth-century debate on the relative merits of positivism and phenomenology. In Verne's work, the doctrine of positivism, which has been constituted in terms of an ideology of science, is only celebrated in so far as its limitations are recognized. In Conrad's work, man's struggle to conquer Nature through a physical and verbal mastery of his environment is reinterpreted as an attempt to overcome his own duality. Conrad's predominantly phenomenological geography of the mind serves as a critique of positivist doctrine, but its fractured topography also suggests that the attempt to substitute 'more traditional views of the social and moral order' (Watt, 163) is, perhaps, little more than a saving illusion. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Since the problem of criticism of Conrad has deteriorated often into a case study of supposed or imagined abnormalities, this study will survey this body of criticism and then attempt to place in proper perspective the various elements which comprise Conrad's artistic individuality. This thesis is intended to present an over-all view of the artistic individuality of Conrad, coupled with a more intensive interpretation of representative novels to illustrate this individuality.

No description available.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the evidences of Conrad's conservative tastes and beliefs as indicated by his way of life and his associations, and to show, further, that this conservatism is revealed directly and indirectly in his stories and novels.

No description available.

Als Arzt, Naturforscher und humanistischer Universalgelehrter befand sich der im 16. Jahrhundert in Zürich lebende Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) an vorderster Front des damaligen Wissens.1,2 Neben seiner Haupttätigkeit als Stadtarzt war er unter anderem auch als Botaniker, Zoologe, Tierarzt, Geograf, Theologe, Philosoph, Bibliograf und Linguist tätig. / A resident of 16th century Zurich, the versatile Swiss physician, naturalist and polymath Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) was at the forefront of the knowledge production of his time. Best known as a botanist and zoologist, his achievements in linguistics are also noteworthy. A major focus of Gessner’s work on languages was the study of the names of plants and animals, individuals, peoples and places. His writings contain hundreds of comments on and explanations of names. Many of them are to be found in the Onomasticon propriorum nominum (1544), in the Bibliotheca universalis (1545) and in the Mithridates (1555). Unfortunately, his work on German personal names, Germanica nomina propria, has been lost. Gessner follows ancient and medieval tradition when explaining names mainly by associating them with other words with a similar sound. As an avid compiler of existing knowledge, he adopts many etymological explanations from other authors. The selection of etymologies from Gessner’s work presented here shows that while he did not always have the right answers to his etymological questions (in fact, he often did not), he was asking the right kinds of questions - although his interpretation of names was limited by a lack of linguistic groundwork so that he was unable to go back far beyond ancient and medieval etymologists. His greatest achievements in this field are perhaps the realization of the importance of names for the comparative study of languages and a recognition of the need for any study of names to start from a comprehensive collection of the material. His work goes far beyond that of his predecessors in terms of his ambition to collect onomastic materials and to analyse them in detail, e.g. regarding compound names. As such, it helped to prepare the ground for what later became the scholarly study of names.