Not available / text

This essay is an investigation of transnational author Joseph Conrad’s engagement with issues of cultural liminality during the years around the turn of the 20th century. Through an examination of Almayer from Almayer’s Folly, Yanko of “Amy Foster”, and Cornelius from Lord Jim, the common experience of cultural displacement is considered. Conrad placed these three culturally liminal characters in various, carefully constructed social environments. Thus far, these characters have been under investigated in the critical literature, particularly the mixed-culture Almayer and Cornelius. By investigating these three characters and their environments, this essay demonstrates how Conrad depicts cultural displacement in the age of nationalism to be increasingly multifaceted but inevitably disastrous. The essay further reveals the need for more careful critical assessments of the cultural nuances of Conrad’s characters.

This dissertation situates literary modernism in the context of a nascent form of globalization. Before it could be fully acknowledged global encroachment was, by virtue of its novelty, repeatedly experienced as a kind of shattering or disintegration. Through an examination of three modernist novels, I argue that a general modernist preoccupation with space both expresses and occludes anxieties over a globe which suddenly seemed to be too small and too undifferentiated. Building upon recent critical work that has begun to historicize modernist understandings of space, I address the as yet under-appreciated ways in which globalism and its discontents informed all of the locales that modernist fictions variously inhabited. For Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, the responses to global change were as diverse as the spaces through which they were inflected. / I begin by identifying a modernist predilection for spatial metaphors. This rhetorical touchstone has, from New Criticism onward, been so sedimented within critical responses to the era that modernism's interest in global space has itself frequently been diminished. In my readings of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Joyce's Ulysses, and Woolf's To the Lighthouse, I argue that the signs of globalization are ubiquitous across modernism. As Conrad repeats and contests New Imperialist constructions of Africa as a vanishing space, that continent becomes the stage for his anxieties over a newly diminished globe. For Joyce, Dublin's conflicted status as both provincial capital and colonial metropolis makes that city the perfect site in which to worry over those recent world-wide developments. Finally, I argue that for Woolf, it is the domestic space which serves best to register and resist the ominous signs of global incursion. In conclusion, I suggest that modernism's anticipatory attention to globalization makes the putative break between that earlier era and postmodernity---itself often predicated upon spatial compression---all the more difficult to maintain.

This thesis argues that Robert Louis Stevenson's South Seas writings locate him alongside Joseph Conrad on the 'strategic fault line' described by the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson that delineates the interstitial area between nineteenth-century adventure fiction and early Modernism. Stevenson, like Conrad, mounts an attack on the assumptions of the grand narrative of imperialism and, in texts such as 'The Beach of Falesa' and The Ebb Tide, offers late-Victorian readers a critical view of the workings of Empire. The present study seeks to analyse the common interests of two important writers as they adopt innovative literary methodologies within, and in response to, the context of changing perceptions of the effects of European influence upon the colonial subject.

This dissertation attempts a Bakhtinian analysis of the polyphonic dialogue between Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Karel Schoeman's Na die Geliefde Land and Jason Xenopoulos' Promised Land. Specific Bakthinian concepts are employed to determine whether the films are "apt" adaptations of the literary texts; how the stylistically hybrid texts engage in conversation with different movements, genres and trends; how the polyphonic conversations between different texts and discourses, such as literature and film, or colonialism and postcolonialism, can provide insight into the variety of discourses, textual and ideological, of a postcolonial, post-apartheid South Africa; and how identity crises experienced by key characters can be explained using the notions of hybridity, "The Marginal Man" and liminality. All four texts have key characters that experience identity crises that spring from cultural hybridity; their cultural hybridity has the potential to either render them marginally stagnant or lead them to liminally active participation within their imagined communities. This dissertation argues that even though there are major differences between the films and the literary texts they are based upon, they are relevant to a specific target audience and therefore enrich the ur-texts. Salient characteristics of realism, symbolism, impressionism, modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism and the apocalyptic dialogise one another within the four texts, thereby liberating the texts from one authorial reading. The dialogue between the discourses of literature and film supplement an understanding of the dialogue between war, imperialism, colonialism, postcolonialism and the Will to Power. / Thesis (M.A. (Applied Language and Literary Studies))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2006

Because of critical neglect, there is no established terminology to describe techniques of suspense. Borrowing from Aristotle, Koestler, and others, a new body of concepts is suggested and importantly, a distinction of tense is established, between types of suspense which relate to the narrative past, present, and future. The classical world's intuition of a connection between mental uncertainty and the physical state of hanging has conditioned Western man's notion of narrative suspense until a comparatively recent date. Eighteenth-century theories of the sublime helped to create an understanding that suspense was not necessarily painful. Through an analysis of novels by Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, Hardy, and Conrad, an attempt is made to identify and evaluate the most common suspense strategies in the period's popular genres, notably the Austenian romance, mystery, and tragedy. The Austenian romance is compared to the detective story in that narrative presentation is determined by the need to control the reader's expectations, and to achieve an ending which is both satisfactory and surprising. The latter requirement may have contributed to the gradual disappearance of the authorial "voice" in the course of the nineteenth century, and a consequent reduction in the pleasures of irony and comedy. During the Victorian period, many genres are combined in the long novel, but mystery gradually advances in popularity and sophistication, to the point where narrative events are often inappropriately exploited as secrets. Tragedy involves a creative conflict between the reader's hopes and expectations, so he is permitted to glimpse the overall tragic process, and suspense is generated on the levels of theme and causaliy. The problems incurred by an inability or unwillingness to conclude structures of theme suspense are considered finally.

Aquesta tesi vol demostrar que Joseph Conrad i William Faulkner, en les novel·les Lord Jim i Absalom, Absalom! respectivament, reflexionen sobre la credibilitat de la veu en la ficció i del discurs racial per mitjà de l'exploració tècnica de la veu narrativa i dels estereotips racials. Nascuda de les crisis històriques que giren al voltant de les relacions racials, patides al si de l'Imperi Britànic de finals del segle XIX i al Sud dels Estats Units durant la dècada de 1930, l'articulació d'aquests dos aspectes en les novel·les permet una representació de les qüestions racials que és innovadora i ambivalent. Certament, la interrogació de la credibilitat dels discursos, tan comú en la novel·la moderna, porta a la sofisticació tant de les estratègies narratives que exploren el problema de la fiabilitat en la ficció com de l'ús dels estereotips racials a dins de la narració, entesos, doncs, com a formes narratives. És justament en l'anàlisi de les correspondències entre els aspectes històrics i els aspectes formals on la tesi troba la manera complexa en què aquestes dues novel·les expressen les tensions racials pròpies dels contextos històrics que les engendren. / This dissertation intends to demonstrate that Joseph Conrad's novel Lord Jim and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! explore the narrative strategy of narrative voice, on the one hand, and racial stereotypes, on the other, in order to reflect upon the credibility of voice in fiction as well as the trustworthiness of racial discourse. Emerging from the historical ideological crisis that involved race relations in the late nineteenth-century British Empire, and in the 1930s U.S. South, the blending of these two aspects allowed an alternative and ambivalent representation of racial issues in fiction. The interrogation of credibility, very common in the Modern novel, results in these novels in a sophistication of the strategies that address the problem of narrative reliability, and of the use of racial stereotypes for narrative purposes in other words, their conception as narrative forms. By paying attention to these two aspects, this thesis claims that it is in the analysis of their intertwining where we may find the expression of the historical tension born of complex race relations.

The thesis develops a comprehensive account of human political ontology through the discussion of Plato, Rousseau, Lacan, Lyotard, Hugo, Conrad, Tolstoy and Nietzsche. At the heart of this account lies the dialectical struggle between an individual's need to belong and their fidelity to an intuitively recognisable, yet difficult to define good (or set of goods), that has, over the millennia, been conceptualised as, amongst other things, the form of the good, self interest, compassion, love, friendship, the event, conscience, reason and truth. Through the development of this account of human political ontology the thesis will elucidate the stakes involved in emancipatory acts, be they broad social movements or individual transformations. Its most important argument is that people almost always fail to recognise that to which they belong; the consequence of this being that they mistake the acts which function to reaffirm their belonging for acts that are indicative of their sovereign being. This phenomenon becomes particularly troubling once we recognise that the acts which function to reaffirm an individual??s belonging can depend upon the individual sacrificing both themself and others.

The thesis develops a comprehensive account of human political ontology through the discussion of Plato, Rousseau, Lacan, Lyotard, Hugo, Conrad, Tolstoy and Nietzsche. At the heart of this account lies the dialectical struggle between an individual's need to belong and their fidelity to an intuitively recognisable, yet difficult to define good (or set of goods), that has, over the millennia, been conceptualised as, amongst other things, the form of the good, self interest, compassion, love, friendship, the event, conscience, reason and truth. Through the development of this account of human political ontology the thesis will elucidate the stakes involved in emancipatory acts, be they broad social movements or individual transformations. Its most important argument is that people almost always fail to recognise that to which they belong; the consequence of this being that they mistake the acts which function to reaffirm their belonging for acts that are indicative of their sovereign being. This phenomenon becomes particularly troubling once we recognise that the acts which function to reaffirm an individual??s belonging can depend upon the individual sacrificing both themself and others.

Zugl.: Wien, Univ., Diss., 2004