Overview
The book builds on current interventions in modernist scholarship in order to rethink Joseph Conrad's contribution to literary history. It utilizes emerging critical modernisms, the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, and late modernist fiction, to stage an encounter between Conrad and a radically different literary tradition. It does so in order to uncover critical blind spots that have limited our appreciation of his poetics. The purpose of this investigation is threefold: first, to participate in recent critical attempts to correct a neglect of ontological preoccupations in Conrad's writing and uncover the author's exploration of a human subject beyond the Cartesian cogito. Second, to demonstrate the manner in which such an exploration is accompanied by the reconfiguration of the very building blocks of fiction: character, narration, focalization, language and plot have to be rethought to accommodate a subject who is no longer conceived of as autonomous and whole but is rendered permeable and interdependent. Third, to show how this redrawing of the literary imaginary communicates with the projects of late modernist writers such as Samuel Beckett, writers whose literary endeavours have long been held separate from Conrad's. In the spirit of current re-examinations of modernism and critical endeavours to think it anew outside the commonplaces that once defined it, this study returns to Conrad's art with an eye to twentieth-century shifts in the way we process, understand and evaluate information. Thematic, stylistic and philosophical instantiations of the slow are offered here as a gauge for this meaningful transformation.
Full Product Details
Author: Associate Professor of English Yael Levin (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Imprint: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780191896538
ISBN 10: 0191896535
Publication Date: 17 September 2020
Audience:
General/trade
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General
Format: Undefined
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Author Information
Yael Levin Yael Levin is associate professor of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and vice-president of the Joseph Conrad Society of America. She is author of Tracing the Aesthetic Principle of Conrad's Novels (2008) and winner of the Bruce Harkness Young Conrad Scholar award. Her work on Conrad, Samuel Beckett, modernism, postmodernism, disability, narratology and the subject has been published in; inter alia, Journal of Modern Literature, Journal of Beckett Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, Conradian, Conradiana, Estudios Irlandeses and Partial Answers.
