Book contents
- Globalization and Literary Studies
- Cambridge Critical Concepts
- Globalization and Literary Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Origins
- Part II Development
- Chapter 6 Joseph Conrad, the Global and the Sea
- Chapter 7 Mutual Equality
- Chapter 8 Edward Said
- Chapter 9 The New McWorld Order
- Chapter 10 Pharmakon, Difference and the Arche-Digital
- Chapter 11 Time–Space Compression
- Chapter 12 The Matter of Blackness in World Literature
- Chapter 13 World-Systems, Literature and Geoculture
- Chapter 14 World Author
- Part III Application
- References
- Index
Chapter 6 - Joseph Conrad, the Global and the Sea
from Part II - Development
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 April 2022
- Globalization and Literary Studies
- Cambridge Critical Concepts
- Globalization and Literary Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Origins
- Part II Development
- Chapter 6 Joseph Conrad, the Global and the Sea
- Chapter 7 Mutual Equality
- Chapter 8 Edward Said
- Chapter 9 The New McWorld Order
- Chapter 10 Pharmakon, Difference and the Arche-Digital
- Chapter 11 Time–Space Compression
- Chapter 12 The Matter of Blackness in World Literature
- Chapter 13 World-Systems, Literature and Geoculture
- Chapter 14 World Author
- Part III Application
- References
- Index
Summary
This chapter considers how the powerfully controversial modernist novelist Joseph Conrad acquired his reputation as the first truly ‘global’ writer. A trilingual Polish expatriate, Conrad’s transnational identity was shaped by – and in turn helped shape our understandings of – a new sense of global interconnectedness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In texts such as Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Nostromo, his engagement with what we would now call globalization is bedevilled by paradox and ambivalence. His writing scorns European globetrotters even as it beholds the world via a privileged Western gaze. His innocent fascination with maps is haunted by a guilty awareness of their political and ideological functions. Under no illusions about the vicious impact of European imperialism on non-European cultures, he often represents those cultures as voiceless, one-dimensional and exotically unknowable. Finally, his idealization of the sea as a bracingly pure alternative to the sordid political world of terra firma is steadily undercut by his sense that maritime space has long since been colonized by capitalist modernity.
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- Information
- Globalization and Literary Studies , pp. 97 - 109Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022