Frustrated Listening: The Aural Landscape of Heart of Darkness

Free, Melissa

doi:10.1353/cnd.2015.0014

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 21 publications

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“…This rhetoric of exploitation, of course, communicates itself effectively and makes sense to the colonial public: it has aroused other colonists' "jealousy and admiration." In this way, Kurtz, as Melissa Free (2015) points out, provides a perfect foil for the Congo's nature. For it is against a backdrop of silence and secrecy that "his words" can "stand out" to earn him attention and a "sense of real presence.…”

Section: Nature Revengesmentioning

confidence: 97%

“It Was the Stillness of an Implacable Force”: A Lyotardian Study of Ecology in Heart of Darkness

Hosseini

2022

Int. J. Appl. Linguist. Engl. Lit.

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This essay examines nature in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in the light of Lyotard’s discourse of ecology and his other philosophical ideas. His postmodernist criticism of conformity and representability, as asserted in his notion of ecology and implied throughout his whole philosophy, provides a lens through which to see nature as an unruly agent that challenges Western development in epistemological and linguistic terms. Such an understanding of nature, Lyotard suggests, necessitates the deconstructive power of avant-garde art, especially literary writing, which Conrad’s 1899 text best prefigures. Set mainly in the wilderness of colonial Congo during the nineteenth century, the widely acknowledged postcolonial novella at once invites an ecocritical reading of how European developed culture struggles and eventually fails to prove mastery over African nature.

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Section: Nature Revengesmentioning

confidence: 97%

“It Was the Stillness of an Implacable Force”: A Lyotardian Study of Ecology in Heart of Darkness

Hosseini

2022

Int. J. Appl. Linguist. Engl. Lit.

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The Textual Apparatus of Empire in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Nayar

2022

Anglia

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This essay argues that the collapse of Empire in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is troped as the erosion of textuality. Five key instances of this textual collapse occur in the novel: the maps Marlow reads as a child, the accounting books, the seaman’s manual, the Kurtz Report and the Company papers. There are also a few minor instances of similar textual collapses, which also come to attention here. The essay notes that in each case the text’s significance is lost or altered in specific ways, and this contributes to the erosion of the authority of the text.

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Frustrated Listening: The Aural Landscape of Heart of Darkness

Cited by 2 publications

References 21 publications

“It Was the Stillness of an Implacable Force”: A Lyotardian Study of Ecology in Heart of Darkness

“It Was the Stillness of an Implacable Force”: A Lyotardian Study of Ecology in Heart of Darkness

The Textual Apparatus of Empire in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

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