Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' and Contemporary Thought by Lawtoo, Nidesh -- Read -- Imperial Library of Trantor

Index

Cover-Page Half-Title Series Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgements Preface

Notes

Introduction: ‘An emotion of thought’

Encounters The moon and the halo The chorus Notes

Notes

Part One: Mythic Darkness

1 Heart of Darkness revisited

Notes

2 Modernism, myth and Heart of Darkness

Notes

3 Civilization and its darkness

Degeneration Perversion Primeval density The metaphysics of oblivion Notes

Part Two: Conrad avec Lacoue-Labarthe

4 A frame for ‘The Horror of the West’

Philosopher-poet Framing the frame Mythic mimesis Western barbarity Notes

5 The horror of the West

Notes

6 Philippe’s lessons of darkness

The darkness of a sacrificial heart Coda: The darkness at the heart of genocide Notes

Part Three: The Affect of Ideology

7 La lettre, Lacan, Lacoue-Labarthe: Heart of Darkness redux

Social organization Family romance Notes

8 The voice of darkness

The textual voice as literary artefact Pardon my French: The linguistic conundrum as textual voice Ideological darkness versus textual voice Notes

9 The horror of trauma: Mourning or melancholia in Heart of Darkness?

Affective politics: Kurtz’s myth and Marlow’s response The assertion of melancholia Notes

Part Four: The Echo of the Horror

10 Conrad’s Dionysian elegy

Notes

11 Sounding the hollow heart of the West: X-rays and the technique de la mort

Body politics and the heart of the matter Seeing through colonialism The hollow body: Kurtz, Marlow and co. Notes

12 The horror of mimesis: Echoing Lacoue-Labarthe

The mimetic frame Mimetic sexism and colonial ideology The racist pathos of mimetic rhetoric The barbarity of mimesis Notes

Postface: A talk with Avital Ronell (about Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe)

Notes

Bibliography Index