Thesis--University of Wisconsin--Madison. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 226-233).

Texte remanié de: D. Phil. th.--Oxford (GB)--Oxford university. / Bibliogr. p. [231]-244. Index.

Joseph Conrad's Nostromo is extremely complex in materials, methods, and attitudes towards life, and so is open to a number of approaches and interpretations. This paper, which is the result of an effort to see the novel as a self-contained literary form, is based on the judgment that, although the book has strong strains of realism and romance, it is essentially ironic both in its form and in the view of life which it embodies, as the terms "irony" and "ironic" are used by Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism. The paper undertakes to demonstrate some of the uses of plot and point of view in giving form to an ironic view of life. The study considers the form for its own sake as an artistic composition as well as its function in embodying an attitude towards life, insofar as these two aspects of form can be usefully separated. Certain lines in the plot-structure are traced throughout the book, but most of the paper consists of the analysis of a number of selected scenic passages considered as independent structures. This analysis is concerned with the function of the scenes as episodes in the plot, the technical methods covered by the concept of point of view and their effects, and the total effect of the scene. The paper deals primarily with the five characters: Mrs. Gould, Charles Gould, Nostromo, Decoud, and Dr. Monygham. It considers each of them as a protagonist in a line of the complex plot, and considers the treatment of each one in relation to the control of distance by means of the techniques of point of view. Mrs. Gould, whose story contains strains of both romance and irony, struggles to maintain her belief in the private values of love and compassion and in the traditional public values of integrity and reason. Each of the four men is engaged in a struggle to achieve or maintain a sense of his own value. The paper interprets this struggle in terms of the formation and transformation of identity in relation to symbols of authority, both private symbols such as parental figures and public symbols such as social class and country. The essential irony of the plot lies in two factors. The symbols of authority are either inadequate or corrupt, and the sense of one's own identity is an illusion, a belief with no objective basis. It is a psychic necessity, but it leads to self-deception and is frequently destructive. Nostromo's story, which combines strains of satire and romance, leads to a resolution full of ironic qualifications, but suggesting the triumph of the romantic egoist who rejects all symbols of authority. The handling of point of view is extremely flexible both in its use of implicated narrators and observers and in the variety of relationships between the impersonal narrator and his material. The fluidity in the handling of point of view has an aesthetic value and is also functional in presenting an ironic view of life. The use of implicated narrators emphasizes the discrepancies resulting from the insurmountable limitations of man's knowledge either of himself or of other people, and suggests that there is no ultimate truth within which these discrepancies may be reconciled. The control of distance also has ironic implications. The paper analyzes some of the technical factors in the control of distance, and finds that there is no really sustained attitude towards any of the chief male characters. The effects range from satire to tragic irony. The shifting distance is functional in creating an image of a world in which unequivocal judgments are impossible and in which, as Conrad said, "The comic and the tragic jostle each other at every step." Nostromo is an example on a vast scale of literature in the ironic mode, defined by Frye as "an attempt to give form to the shifting ambiguities and complexities of unidealized life." The working out of the complex plot and the remarkable fluidity in the handling of point of view dramatize these ambiguities and complexities but they do so in a way which helps to create artistic order from the materials of chaos. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Tragedy and comedy are, in Conrad's phrase, "but a matter of the visual angle." Tragedy focusses on the individual, comedy on the human community, but each must partake of the other for completion. The aesthetic form of a work of literature represents an order which prevails against the chaos of events, producing in the reader a tension between aloofness and involvement. Conrad's failure to find a technique capable of fully achieving this tension caused his early works to fall short of rendering a tragic vision, but his discovery of the possibilities inherent in the use of a narrator allowed his fiction from The Nigger of the "Narcissus" to Lord Jim to transcend his earlier limitations. By the time he wrote Under Western Eyes, Conrad no longer needed a narrator such as Marlow to achieve distance and was able to utilize his narrator in other ways. In doing so, he was able to create a more traditional tragedy. Almayer's Folly, the most successful of the "Maylayan" novels, presents Almayer’s tragedy as ironic comedy, and only occasionally falls into the cynicism to which its pessimistic philosophy is prey. An Outcast of the Islands. however, despite advances in characterization and plot development, is too overtly and discursively philosophical to succeed. And The Rescue, with its romantically tragic philosophy and tone, proved to be a cul-de-sac. Breaking off from work on The Rescue. Conrad found, in his experience as a seaman and in the employment of a narrator, means of liberation that allowed him to write an almost wholly positive work, a comedy of salvation through communal effort. The somewhat inconsistently used narrator allows the reader to comprehend both the decadent influence of Wait, the "nigger", and the benign influence of Singleton, who "steered with care," without losing sight of the tale as aesthetic work. Marlow, narrator of "Heart of Darkness" and Lord Jim, performs somewhat the same function, but is technically consistent and stands in a much more complex relation to the story. "Heart of Darkness" provides the tragic point of view to complement The Nigger's comedy. Lord Jim represents Conrad's first achievement of a sustained tragic vision, yet it is not a tragedy; its center is divided between Jim's tragic experience and Marlow's tragic awareness. The complex narrative method allows the reader to participate in Marlow's search for understanding through recognition of Jim as "one of us. " An image is created which has the sculptural quality of lacking inherent point of view, but which is never completely sharpened. Jim is important to Marlow for the romantic illusion to which he is true and which seems to offer a possibility of finding dignity. Stein's butterflies symbolize this dream, while his beetles symbolize the counter-illusion of the realists like Brown. Marlow, aware of the illusory nature of both, seeks an integrated vision. The language teacher of Under Western Eyes is used differently from Marlow. He is ironically presented as an impartial recorder of events, helping to clarify the political differences but human similarities between Russia and the West. Razumov is unlike Jim in that he starts from a "realistic" illusion of worldly success and is brought by circumstances to a vision of human contact, a radical transformation, and one of which he is fully aware. The novel is a tragedy in the conventional sense and is a profound treatment of the relation between a man and his society, yet, despite such effective techniques as the use of Christian allusions to establish a shared set of values, it lacks the richness of Lord Jim. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1937. / Vita. Published also without thesis note. Includes bibliographical references (p. 407-412) and index.

Techn. Univ., Diss.--Braunschweig, 2000. / Literaturverz. S. 256 - 301.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1931 A41

No description available.

Thesis advisor: Michael C. Martin / One way in which these ideas and influences are presented to humanity is through literature. By illustrating the processes and insights of the characters in search of the answers to these ultimate questions, novels can successfully portray the philosophical moment of clarity. Two novels in which the reader gains an insight into this moment of clarity are Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Each of these novels provides a different lens, focus and conclusion in the search for what is important in life and how humanity should view the world. Both authors use literature, specifically character experiences of moments of clarity, in order to portray a philosophy to the reader. Through the medium of literature, the reader is able to emotionally engage and become invested in the outcome of the characters and conclusion of the authors. This engagement of the reader creates a unique connection which fosters the ability for the reader to identify elements of the philosophical application in his or her own life which is absent through traditional philosophical texts. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2007. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

This thesis examines how the fiction of Joseph Conrad anticipates and enacts the elaborate model of subjectivity that is later formalised in the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. While modernist criticism has often utilised the work of post‐structuralism in reading key texts of modernism, the complexity and profundity of the conceptual relationship between Conrad and Lacan has not yet been explored in depth. Conrad’s work captures the impact and influence of emerging transnational capital upon forms of the subject in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Further, his fiction is also sensitive to how nascent global capital structures forms of space that the subject is embedded within in their daily experience. I argue that it is the intricate and finely woven theories of Lacan that are necessary in identifying this area of the novelist’s work, as Lacan’s model contends with both the individual psychic structure of the subject, and, crucially, how the individual is located and constituted within the broader matrix of social reality. Using four of Conrad’s novels from his early period to the end of his major phase, the thesis traces the evolution of the various fundamental modalities of Lacan’s subject across Conrad’s fiction. I examine how Almayer’s Folly offers the key tenets of Lacan’s primary model of the subject of desire, while Lord Jim presents the transition of the subject of desire into Lacan’s later mode of the subject of drive. Subsequently, The Secret Agent is shown to critique the role of rationalism in the structuring of the subject’s consciousness, while, finally, I read Under Western Eyes as a tour de force of Lacan’s four discourses. The deep and fundamental relationship between the two figures’ work attests to their acuity in observing the development of the subject in the twentieth century, while the method of theoretical analysis also, on a wider disciplinary level, suggests and helps to confirm the continued validity of the mode of deep reading in literary interpretation.