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Conrad's Personal Voice
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- By Jakob Lothe
- Edited by Jolanta Dudek, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Andrzej Juszczyk, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Joanna Skolik, Uniwersytet Opolski
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- Book:
- Essays on Joseph Conrad in Memory of Prof. Zdzisław Najder (1930-2021)
- Published by:
- Jagiellonian University Press
- Published online:
- 01 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 25 April 2023, pp 105-116
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Summary
While Zdzisław Najder's Joseph Conrad: A Life (1983, 2007) is widely acclaimed for the author's insights into Conrad's Polish background, his Conrad in Perspective: Essays on Art on Fidelity (1997) places Conrad's work within a broad European philosophical, historical, cultural and literary context. In my own work on Conrad I have found, and continue to find, both these books indispensable.
What is perhaps less known in Conrad studies is Najder's significant contribution to narrative analysis, not least the intersection between narrative analysis and reader response criticism. Highlighting this aspect of Najder's work, this essay will identify and discuss aspects of Conrad's “personal voice” in one of the author's most original works of fiction, Lord Jim (1900). My argument is that in this novel, a key text in the Conrad canon as well as in European modernism, Conrad's personal voice is identifiable in, and thus represented by, a unique combination of narrative agents and components that cumulatively serve to constitute the narrative communication of a remarkable literary text. By no means exhaustive, my discussion will assume the form of a commentary on three selected passages from the novel; these passages are, I argue, illustrative of different yet related aspects of Conrad's personal voice.
Najder uses the term “personal voice” in his essay in Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre (2008). That this volume is a contribution to the “Theory and Interpretation of Narrative” series published by The Ohio State University Press is in itself a strong indication of the chapter's pertinence to the study of narrative; moreover, “voice,” the first word of the subtitle, is a key narrative concept discussed not just by Najder but also by other contributors to the volume.
In his essay, which is the first chapter of the abovementioned book, Najder calls for more critical attention to the ways in which “the personal voice in Conrad's fiction” engages the reader of Lord Jim. Taking his cue from the much-discussed contrast between the third-person narrative of the novel's first four chapters and the “personalized knowledge” of Marlow and his interlocutors that the reader encounters from chapter 5 onwards, Najder's discussion invites the reader to reflect on the dual roles of first-person narrators (as tellers and characters).
10 - Narrative, Testimony, Fiction: The Challenge of Not Forgetting the Holocaust
- from III - The Second World War and Vichy: Present Perspectives
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- By Jakob Lothe, Professor of English Literature at the University of Oslo and adjunct professor at the University of Bergen
- Edited by Lia Brozgal, Sara Kippur
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- Book:
- Being Contemporary: French Literature, Culture and Politics Today
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 12 July 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2016, pp 162-176
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Summary
Soon there will be no living survivors of the Holocaust. How then can we remember this appalling, in one sense still incomprehensible, event in ways that do not lessen, distort, or misrepresent it? Or perhaps rather, as time passes and the last survivors pass away, how can we manage not to forget the Holocaust? What role can literature and film play here? To what extent, and in what ways, can aesthetics contribute to the representation of an issue in which the ethical aspect is so prominent?
The use of ‘we’ in these questions is not coincidental: it is important that we all remember, or at least make a serious attempt not to forget, the Holocaust. That this strong need is distinctly contemporary has been forcefully demonstrated by the recent terror attacks in Paris (January 9, 2015) and Copenhagen (February 15, 2015). Since, at least in part, these attacks targeted Jews, and since they can be linked to other antisemitic incidents, it comes as no surprise that many European Jews are planning to emigrate from the continent to whose culture and civilization they have so significantly contributed.
If, as I believe, literature and film can make a contribution to our attempt not to forget the Holocaust, this is because, using a range of aesthetic means, both media can focus on individuals’ experiences in ways that make an impact on the reader and on the viewer. In addition to being possessed of a value of its own, this kind of aesthetically created empathy may also serve to improve readers’ and viewers’ understanding of the Holocaust. To make this point is surely not to suggest that we do not need historical information about, and continuing historical research on, the Holocaust. Nor does it follow that the testimonies we already have will become less important. There are many contemporary writers who were children, adolescents, or adults during the Holocaust, and who have dealt with that experience in their works; there are also many survivors who have agreed to be interviewed, thus making it possible to record and preserve their stories.
8 - John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage
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- By Jakob Lothe, University of Oslo
- Edited by R. Barton Palmer, Clemson University, South Carolina
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- Book:
- Nineteenth-Century American Fiction on Screen
- Published online:
- 22 December 2009
- Print publication:
- 08 March 2007, pp 133-145
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Summary
The challenges and processes of adaptation both resemble each other and differ from each other. On the one hand, all film adaptations of novels involve a transfer from the medium of verbal prose fiction to that of film. It is important to remember that this is a radical form of transfer – a “translation into film language,” as the Russian formalist Boris Eikhenbaum put it as early as 1926 – regardless of what kind of adaptation is being made. On the other hand, one and the same literary text can, of course, be adapted in different ways according to the director's ideas, as regards both filmmaking in general and adaptation in particular. Moreover, the director's adaptation of a literary text is unavoidably marked by his or her response to, and interpretation of, that text; and as we all know, such interpretations can vary very considerably. As Robert Stam has shown, the main issue here is not an adaptation's “fidelity” to a literary text but rather a complex form of dialogue between two different media. Even though it is possible to consider the phenomenon and practice of adaptation as a translation from one medium to another, there is no “transferable core: a single novelistic text comprises a series of verbal signals that can generate a plethora of possible readings, including even readings of the narrative itself.”
7 - Variants on genre
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- By Jakob Lothe
- Edited by Dale Kramer, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 24 June 1999, pp 112-129
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Summary
According to Peter Szondi, a crisis in European drama occurs around 1880. The reason for this crisis is essentially generic: drama is no longer absolute and primary (unfolding as a linear sequence in the present), but relies for its effect on narrative elements incorporated into the dramatic structure. Szondi's main example is Henrik Ibsen, in whose plays - such as Ghosts (1881) and The Wild Duck (1884) - the thematic significance of the actions, dreams, and desires of the main characters is inseparable from their past histories as unravelled through the playwright's sophisticated retrospective technique. “Here the past is not, as in Sophocles' Oedipus, a function of the present.”
Like most turning-points in literary form, the crisis Szondi identifies in European drama in the late nineteenth century is productive in that it precipitates the formal experimentation of twentieth-century drama. Szondi's notion of crisis also implicitly accentuates the link between various forms of generic interplay and the ways in which the characteristic features or sub-genres of one particular genre can be combined. In the genre of drama, Ibsen's dramaturgic use of the past is partly motivated by his understanding of tragedy.
9 - Conradian narrative
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- By Jakob Lothe
- Edited by J. H. Stape
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 27 June 1996, pp 160-178
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Summary
Conradian narrative is not only exceptionally sophisticated and varied but also remarkably productive thematically. In common with all major writers, Conrad's fictional content is inextricable from narrative presentation. To make this point is not to regard the concept of content as unimportant. It is to stress that the rhetorical persuasiveness, ideological tension, dramatic intensity, and continuing interest and relevance of Conrad's fictional vision depend upon and are indeed generated and shaped by diverse and original narrative techniques. It follows that a discussion of Conradian narrative is a substantial critical venture. This treatment will focus on a selection of particularly important constituent aspects of Conrad's narrative strategies. Progressing chronologically, it ranges over most of Conrad's major works and concludes with a consideration of the thematic significance of Conradian narrative.
Even though the dramatic intensity and thematic suggestiveness of Conradian narrative can vary considerably from work to work, there is no direct or obvious correlation between narrative success and date of composition in Conrad‘s fiction. Although the artistic quality of the fiction subsequent to Under Western Eyes generally deteriorates, texts such as Victory, ‘The Tale’, and The Shadow-Line are notable exceptions. More importantly, Conradian narrative matured very rapidly. In Almayer‘s Folly, Conrad‘s first novel, the narrative presents not just the main action revealing Almayer‘s inglorious situation and futile dreams, but also a covert plot centred on Abdullah‘s schemes to eliminate Almayer as a trading rival. While supporting the main plot‘s characterization of Almayer, this covert plot also, as we are more likely to discover on a second rather than a first reading, precipitates its outcome (Watts, A Preface to Conrad, p. 119).