A revaluation of values: Joseph Conrad's novels as a criticism of the nineteenth century.
Date
2005
Authors
DiSanto, Michael John.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Dalhousie University
Abstract
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.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 2005.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 2005.
Keywords
Literature, English.