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"This module will introduce students the novels of Joseph Conrad, one of the greatest of English fiction writers. ‘English’, but of Polish birth and possessed of multiple languages, Conrad forged a distinguished second career as a writer partly out of his early career as a seaman and master. In novels such as The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, Nostromo, and The Shadow Line, Conrad charts the contours of modernity, a world where ‘all that is solid turns into air’ in Marx’s words. Conrad’s fictions narrate a world of globalisation, exile, movement and alienation, where ideals are undermined, where authority is fabricated and where conflict is omnipresent. In other words, Conrad describes a world very like our own – few writers of the nineteenth century seem so strikingly our contemporary.
Though his writing is often marked by dramatic and violent action, Conrad also stands as one of the great stylists of English prose, a characteristic which emerges partly at least from the exigencies of his own situation and from his sophisticated sense of language as uncertain and impalpable. This elective module will introduce students to novels across the full range of Conrad’s career. We will also look at his short stories and his autobiographical writing. A full and detailed sense of Conrad’s contexts – Polish, maritime, imperial, literary and political – will be developed in this closely focussed study of a great and dramatic novelist."
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JOSEPH CONRAD: MELANCHOLY HERALD OF THE MODERN
