| dc.description | My thesis examines Conrad's novels as criticism of Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. I argue that his art is a critical response to their thinking and to the forms in which that thinking is embodied. Conrad offers a distinct perspective on nineteenth-century thinkers, writing critiques of their ideas and narrative structures using the novel form. My discussion foregrounds Conrad's Heart of Darkness , Lord Jim, The Secret Agent , Under Western Eyes, and Victory . In the first chapter I explore Heart of Darkness as criticism of Carlyle's ideals of work and hero-worship. The second chapter focuses on Conrad's The Secret Agent as a rewriting of Dickens's Bleak House. I argue that Conrad uses elements of Dickens's detective narratives and reworks Dickens's negative grammar of knowing. Chapter Three is a reconsideration of the relationship between Conrad's Under Western Eyes and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment in which I explore Conrad's refashioning of Dostoevsky's use of confessions and idealization of self-sacrificial women. In the fourth chapter I explore how Lord Jim is a reassessment of Darwin's and Nietzsche's arguments concerning the instincts for self-preservation and self-destruction, one which anticipates Freud's arguments in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Chapter Five is a discussion of Conrad's ambivalent relationship with Nietzsche which uses Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, and Victory to show that Conrad exposes Nietzsche's opposition to Christ as a complicated form of sympathetic identification. The last chapter is a comparison of Lord Jim and Freud's Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria ("Dora") as modernist narratives. While Freud claims to possess a kind of omniscience in relation to his patient in fashioning a kind of detective narrative, Conrad points towards the difficulties in knowing the other with any certainty. | en_US |
