Class Notes: February 7-February 17

Class Notes: February 7-February 17

We’ve been studying Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Heart of Darkness

·         Post-colonial novella

·         Set in the Belgian Congo

·         Conrad includes a lot of allusions to the Garden of Eden and Dante’s Inferno, and thus introduces a lot of symbolism revolving around heaven and hell (the Congo is both)

·         Uses a lot of contrasts; discusses the relationships between light and dark, heaven and hell, good and evil

·         The African woman, who Kurtz most likely has some type of a sexual relationship with, stands to represent the African people/society

Chinua Achebe’s review

·         Discusses that despite Conrad’s foreward thinking, he still is a racist

Mark Dintenfass’s review

·         Joseph Conrad spent time in Africa as Marlow does in Heart of Darkness, and “like Marlow, the experience left him morally shaken and physically ill” (1)

·         “the messiness and confusion and darkness of experience is in itself an interesting thing” (3)

·         “[Novelists] are rather in the business of re-creating and communicating the rich complexities of experience itself” (4)

·         This can make novels extremely confusing, especially in the case of Heart of Darkness

·         “Explicitness, my dear fellow, is fatal to the glamour of all artistic work” (6)

·         “We can try to understand Heart of Darkness in various ways depending upon what sorts of questions we ask of it” (7)

Apocalypse Now

·         Movie representation of Heart of Darkness

·         Although the movie follows roughly the same plot line, it is set in Vietnam instead of the Congo