Description
Book SynopsisJoseph Conrad’s ethical perspective is one of the deepest in twentieth-century fiction, yet its study has been overlooked in recent scholarship.
Joseph Conrad and Ethics is one of very few books fully devoted to ethics in Conrad’s fiction. It offers a thorough, in-depth analysis of Conrad’s ethical reflection that challenges and extends current scholarly discussions.
The authors of this theoretically informed, accessible volume examine Conrad’s representation of ethics through the lens of Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and Ricoeur, among others, and confront Conrad’s ethical perspective to these philosophers’ views. Through detailed studies of works like “Heart of Darkness,”
The Secret Agent,
Lord Jim and
Under Western Eyes, they navigate the conflicted terrain of ethics and morality, highlighting the enmeshment of ethics and aesthetics, ethics and narrative, and ethics and ideology in Conrad’s fiction. The key issues they address include the ethics of storytelling and readership, ethical commitment and detachment, the ethics of uncertainty and uneasiness, and planetary ethics and ethical disillusionment.
Conrad is ambivalent about ethics and this interdisciplinary volume pivots around a fundamental Conradian ethical paradox: how to account for ethical responsibility in a world not meant for ethics in the first place and, as Conrad stated, whose “aim cannot be ethical at all.” It demonstrates that Conrad adopts a planetary ethics that embraces the human condition in its universality, while he also doubts the viability of ethics itself. Via his protagonists’ moral predicaments he expresses both the necessity of ethics in human relationships and the impossibility of individual ethical fulfillment.
The book is volume 30 of the series Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives, edited by Wiesław Krajka. It explores a major, understudied Conradian topic – Ethics, and adds an important thematic and theoretical dimension to this series. The chapters are written by experts from various universities worldwide, in keeping with the international, cosmopolitan spirit of Eastern and Western Perspectives. The authors’ wide-ranging, original perspectives on ethics open new venues in Conrad scholarship that will greatly benefit scholars and students of Conrad, modernism, and ethics.
Table of ContentsAmar Acheraïou: Introduction
Amar Acheraïou: Narrative and Ethics: Being, Meaning, and Reading
Aileen Miyki Farrar: Narrative Autophagy and the Ethics of Storytelling in “Heart of Darkness”
J. A. Bernstein: Under Straining Eyes: Joseph Conrad and the Problem of “Moral Luck”
Thomas Higgins: “He died for the Revolution”: Anarchism and Ethical Commitment in
The Secret AgentCatherine Delesalle-Nancey: Ethics as
The Secret Agent in Joseph Conrad’s Novel
Laëtitia Crémona: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics in Hitchcock’s
SabotageNathalie Martinière: An Ethics of Uneasiness: Reading Joseph Conrad’s African stories with Francis Bacon
Subhadeep Ray: “After such knowledge what forgiveness?”: Nature, Community and Individual Ethics in Joseph Conrad’s “Because of the Dollars” and Adwaita Mallabarman’s
A River Called TitasHarold Ray Stevens: The Cross of Christ as Afterthought: Killing the Christian Ethic at “An Outpost of Progress”
