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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary theory
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The Art of Failure - Conrad's Fiction (Paperback)
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The Art of Failure - Conrad's Fiction (Paperback)
Series: Routledge Library Editions: Joseph Conrad
Expected to ship within 12 - 19 working days
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Originally published in 1986, this is a powerful and original book.
It offers textual interpretation of Conrad's major work and
articulates the subtlety and richness of his treatment of
social-political institutions and of the forces that complicate and
distort private and public life. Suresh Raval argues that the
social-personal relations in Conrad's fiction cannot be conceived
apart from their existence in the political life of a community;
but at the same time they cannot be accommodated institutionally.
The author's concern is with the problematic status of the self
under various perspectives: experience and understanding (Heart of
Darkness), an ethical ideal (Lord Jim), history (Nostromo),
ideology (The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes), scepticism
(Victory). What the self is remains ambiguous and elusive. Conrad's
fiction is concerned with exhibiting the failure of language, but
always as a result of an immense effort of language itself. As
language undoes itself in the act of seeking utterance, so Conrad's
fictional mode - romance - turns into the opposite of itself as it
unfolds. Raval demonstrates that incompatible alternatives -
intention and action, thought and experience, the individual and
the social, the logical and the contingent - are entangled with
each other, and how this entanglement works in the fiction. Raval's
exploration of Conrad's scepticism shows why Conrad cannot be
characterized as a political conservative or radical without
distorting the complexity and seriousness of his reflection on
society. For his scepticism is the product not just of intelligence
but of intelligence conscious of its limitations, and is thus able
to make a devastating critique of the nihilism sometimes attributed
to Conrad by critics. Only those who think that morality has to
have a secure single foundation if it is to be real are pushed into
regarding Conrad's scepticism as a form of nihilism. Professor
Raval's important study brings philosophical and literary interests
to bear on Conrad's major fiction and illuminates those aspects of
his art which have puzzled and fascinated his readers. It will be
deservedly valued by those studying and teaching modern literature.
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