No description available.

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.

"In its original form, this study was a doctoral dissertation ... Harvard University." / Includes bibliographical references.

Madox Ford est une des grandes figures, non seulement de la littérature d’expressionanglaise, mais de la vie culturelle et artistique d’Europe occidentale dans le premier tiersdu XXe siècle. Il est très lié à Henry James et à Conrad (avec qui il écrit trois romans),joue un rôle de premier plan comme éditeur et contribue au développement del’impressionnisme littéraire et à l’instauration du « modernisme ». Cosmopolite par sesantécédents (anglais, allemand, français), grand voyageur partagé entre l’Angleterre, lesEtats-Unis et la France (surtout la Provence, sa terre d’élection et Toulon), Ford estl’auteur d’une oeuvre considérable qui compte plus de 80 ouvrages. Marine Bernot achoisi d’analyser plus particulièrement une dizaine de récits de souvenirs de toutes sorteset deux récits de voyage qu’il publie de 1904 à 1937. On y découvre toute une époque, unécrivain original et une personnalité d’une rare complexité – politiquement avancé,féministe et libertaire, écologiste avant la lettre, quelque peu visionnaire, un homme quiparle aux gens d’aujourd’hui. / Ford Madox Ford is one of the most important figures, not only of English literature butof the Western European cultural and artistic world of the twentieth century. Closelyconnected with Henry James and Joseph Conrad (with whom he wrote three novels incollaboration), Ford played a vital role as editor, contributor to literary impression and aspioneer of “modernism”. Cosmopolitan by birth (English, German, French), this tirelessvoyager, torn between England, the United States and France (especially Provence, hischosen domain and Toulon), Ford is the author of a voluminous sum of publicationsmade up of more than 80 books and other items. The author of this thesis, Marine Bernot,has chosen to concentrate on a dozen or so memoirs covering the years going from 1904to 1937, focusing particularly on two travel ‘novels’, Provence and The Great TradeRoute. These works, which give an original insight into the first half of the twentiethcentury, introduce the reader to an original and complex personality – politicallyadvanced, feminist, non-conformist, ecologist ahead of his times, visionary –, a man inharmony with contemporary preoccupations.

This thesis analyzes H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness within the context of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory. I explore how Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley used evolution by natural selection to develop differing explanations of the origins of ethics and how this impacted the place each scientist gave morality in civilization. By exploring how Huxley and Darwin understood morality to derive from the phenomena of sympathy and restrain, I illustrate how Wells’s and Conrad’s novellas interrogate these discourses of altruism.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2005. / Advisor: R. Granofsky. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 262-273). Also available via World Wide Web.

This thesis aims to examine the manifestation of ecophobia in negative emotional expressions in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” by Algernon Blackwood and how this relates to colonialism and colonial anxiety. The term ecophobia, popularized by Simon C. Estok, describes deep rooted, negative emotions and attitudes towards the natural environment that is prevalent in most of humanity. This thesis implements the theory of the origin of ecophobia, described by Brian Deyo as a fear of nature’s indifference towards humans and how it confronts us with our own dreaded mortality. According to theories on ecophobia, colonialism has been a successful method to expand western control over the nature that has been perceived as a threat to our existence.Previous research of Heart of Darkness and “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” have not delved into how the negative emotions toward nature and the primitive relates to the root cause of the fears – the fear of our own mortality. This thesis aims to fill that gap. The analysis shows how the main characters of each work display negative emotions according to three categories related to theories of ecophobia: a fear of the primitive core of the civilized man, a fear of transgressions that threatens western narratives and methods used to cover up the fact that we are mortal animals, and a fear of attack against ourselves or our culture that occurs when the methods and narratives fail.

No description available.

This dissertation begins from the problem that is built into realism as a literary genre: its commitment to capturing the unfiltered circumstances of human life will always be at odds with the artifice of its representational constructs and its fiction. In this study, I consider visuality as a central, productive part of this problem and seek intensely visual moments within realist novels where realism wages its own struggle with itself as it attempts to navigate its limitations and push forward its possibilities. These moments pause the narrative as they prioritize picture over action. As descriptive moments work to render visual images through words on the printed page, they are fraught with realism’s struggle to use the artifice of fiction as a means for approximating an ostensible reality. Facing this difficulty, realist practitioners take up vastly different strategies. In this project, I investigate why and how visuality is deployed so differently by those who chose to write in this mode. I seek that which is piercing in the nineteenth-century realist novel by locating moments of crisis and tension, both within the plot and also within the strategies of the stories’ delivery. These are moments where the novel becomes troubled by the visual, revealing the potential and limit of the image. In realism, visuality encompasses a broad and varied array of strategies, including instances of enargeia and ekphrasis, passages that seek to evoke a sense of place or milieu through a rich catalog of visual detail, expressive self-renderings in the dialog and inner monologs of the characters, explorations of the embodied act of seeing, and moments where perception fails or visual description exposes itself as insufficient. I consider a small group of canonical authors: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad, who are of critical importance to this genre and to nineteenth century realism, as it moves towards modernism. By examining moments in their novels where descriptive imagery is at its most acute, I seek to explain how moments of intense visuality are crucial nodes where each author, using unique and distinctive methods, negotiates the problem of realist representation.

This thesis studies Joseph Conrad&rsquo / s Almayer&rsquo / s Folly in terms of two theoretical concepts / othering and hybridity. The first theoretical concept, othering, is analysed from various perspectives for three main reasons: 1) The question of &ldquo / Who is other to whom?&rdquo / cannot be answered thoroughly because there is a continuous power struggle between the European and the non-European characters. 2) The theme of othering in the novel is based on a view of humanity and its conflicts that is radically ambivalent, and thus cannot be analyzed from one perspective only. 3) Conrad&rsquo / s world view which is reflected in the novel is not limited to one group of people, but tends to be universal. The second theoretical concept, hybridity, is analyzed under three subtitles: ambivalence, mimicry and hybridity.