Writing in Between: Modernity and Psychosocial Dilemma in the Novels of Joseph Conrad

ISBN-13: 9780312214838 / Angielski / Twarda / 1999 / 339 str.

Beth Sharon Ash

Opis

In Writing in Between, Beth Sharon Ash develops an important theoretical framework for interpreting Conrad's signal texts and his situation as an author. Using relational psychoanalysis, Ash reinserts into the literary conversation the idea of the psychologically inflected subject. She integrates authorial and fictional subjectivity within specific historical contexts, thus lending agency and density to the "relational subject" without neglecting the social forces which shape it. Organized around the thematics of unfinished mourning, this book carefully positions Conrad as a writer caught 'in between, ' as both a figure of alienation critically disenchanted with British imperialism, and an orphan of genius desperately desiring a fit with his adopted culture. Through fine-grained, often surprising readings of Conrad's novels and broad analyses of psychoanalytic and modernist criticism, Ash persuasively refocuses how one reads Conrad and, in doing this, retheorizes the subject and its literary relations.

Spis treści

Introduction: The Psychosocial Contexts of Conrad: Authorial Subjectivity PART ONE: INDUSTRIALIZATION AND 'SECULAR THEODICY' Alterity and Emptiness: A Psychosocial Reading of The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' Saved from Separation: The Tale's Sentimental Conclusion and the 'Preface' PART TWO: TALES TOLD IN THE MATRIX OF IMPERIALISM: HEART OF DARKNESS AND LORD JIM Imperialist Nation and Self-Fashioning Marlovian Narration and Unreconstructed Ideology Critique Positioning Conrad: Reading for Affect in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim PART THREE: DISAPPEARING LANDMARKS: 'REVOLUTIONARY' SOCIAL CHANGE AND PSYCHOBIOGRAPHY The Political and Personal Cultures of The Secret Agent Conrad in Relation: Wells, Galsworthy, Dostoevsky Under Western Eyes : A 'Russian' Novel by 'Homo-Duplex' Notes Index

O autorze

BETH SHARON ASH is Associate Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati and taught previously for several years at the University of Chicago. She has published extensively on Henry James, other Modernists such as Walter Benjamin, and select topics in critical and literary theory, including Jewish hermeneutics, deconstruction, and psychohistory.