Ross C. Murfin

The New Historicism and Heart of Darkness

The tide of Brook Thomas’s The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (1991) is telling. Whenever an emergent theory, movement, method, approach, or group gets labeled with the adjective “new,” trouble is bound to ensue, for what is new today is either established, old, or forgotten tomorrow. Few of you will have heard of the band called “The New Kids on the Block.” New Age book shops and jewelry may seem “old hat” by the time this introduction is published. The New Criticism, or formalism, is just about the oldest approach to literature and literary study currently being practiced. The new historicism, by contrast, is not as old-fashioned as formalism, but it is hardly new, either. The term “new” eventually and inevitably requires some explanation. In the case of the new historicism, the best explanation is historical.

A Critical History of Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness was published serially in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899. But it was not seriously reviewed until 1902, when it was reprinted in a hard-cover volume entitled Youth. Even then, the other two works published in the collection, Youth and The End of the Tether, were received more favorably. In an unsigned 1902 review Edward Garnett both explained and deplored the fact that Heart of Darkness was the least popular of the three tales. Calling it “too strong” a piece of “meat for the ordinary reader,” he insisted that it was nonetheless “the high water mark” of Conrad’s “talent,” a “psychological masterpiece” relating “the sub-conscious life within us… to our conscious actions, feelings, and outlook.” As such, Garnett concluded, it offers an “analysis of the deterioration of the white man’s morale, when he is let loose from European restraint, and planted down in the tropics as an emissary of light armed to the teeth, to make trade profits out of the subject races” (Sherry 132–33). Responding to Garnett’s review in a personal letter, Conrad wrote: “My dearest fellow you quite overcome me. And your brave attempt to grapple with the foggishness of Heart of Darkness, to explain what I myself tried to shape blindfold, as it were, touched me profoundly” (Karl and Davies 2:467–68).

Cultural Criticism and Heart of Darkness

What do you think of when you think of culture? The opera or ballet? A performance of a Mozart symphony at Lincoln Center or a Rembrandt show at the De Young Museum in San Francisco? Does the phrase “cultural event” conjure up images of young people in jeans and T-shirts — or of people in their sixties dressed formally? Most people hear “culture” and think “high culture.” Consequently, when they first hear of cultural criticism, most people assume it is more formal than, well, say, formalism. They suspect it is “highbrow,” in both subject and style.

Reader-Response Criticism and Heart of Darkness

Students arc routinely asked in English courses for their reactions to the texts they arc reading. Sometimes there arc so many different reactions that wc may wonder whether everyone has read the same text. And some students respond so idiosyncratically to what they read that wc say their responses arc “totally off the wall.” This variety of response interests rcadcr-rcsponsc critics, who raise theoretical questions about whether our responses to a work arc the same as its meanings, whether a work can have as many meanings as we have responses to it, and whether some responses arc more valid than others. They ask what determines what is and what isn’t “off the wall.” What, in other words, is the wall, and what standards help us define it?

Introduction: Biographical and Historical Contexts

Polish, not English, was the language Joseph Conrad grew up speaking. English wasn’t even his second language: French was. The fact that Conrad achieved fame in his third language is testimony to his genius — genius that could be contained neither by linguistic barriers nor by national boundaries. Early political persecution and exile failed to stifle it; even the loss of family and deep personal unhappiness could only restrain it temporarily.

Deconstruction and Heart of Darkness

Deconstruction has a reputation for being the most complex and forbidding of contemporary critical approaches to literature, but in fact almost all of us have, at one time, either deconstructed a text or badly wanted to deconstruct one. Sometimes when we hear a lecturer effectively marshal evidence to show that a book means primarily one thing, we long to interrupt and ask what he or she would make of other, conveniently overlooked passages that seem to contradict the lecturer’s thesis. Sometimes, after reading a provocative critical article that almost convinces us that a familiar work means the opposite of what we assumed it meant, we may wish to make an equally convincing case for our former reading of the text. We may not think that the poem or novel in question better supports our interpretation, but we may recognize that the text can be used to support both readings. And sometimes we simply want to make that point: texts can be used to support seemingly irreconcilable positions.

Feminist and Gender Criticism and Heart of Darkness

Among the most exciting and influential developments in the field of literary studies, feminist and gender criticism participate in a broad philosophical discourse that extends far beyond literature, far beyond the arts in general. The critical practices of those who explore the representation of women and men in works by male or female, lesbian or gay writers inevitably grow out of and contribute to a larger and more generally applicable theoretical discussion of how gender and sexuality are constantly shaped by and shaping institutional structures and attitudes, artifacts and behaviors.