Heart of Darkness

Entering Heart of Darkness from a Postcolonial perspective - Teaching Notes

The Symptoms of a Heart of Darkness

In Heart of Darkness, Conrad appears to construct a symptomatic narrative a narrative which is, itself, intended to be read as a collection of symptoms indicating an underlying historical agent. This symptomatic approach may be read as extending through every aspect of the novella, from characterisation to Conrad's use of metaphor. Symptoms are subjective abnormalities in the status quo, observ...

Journey Into “The Heart of Darkness” REDUX

With the publication of The Psychology of Genocide, Massacres, and Extreme Violence: Why “Normal” People Come to Commit Atrocities, Donald Dutton, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, joins Joseph Conrad, Francis Ford Coppola, and a host of professional peers as a commentator on the nature and origins of human evil. Dutton's volume, however, is neither ...

"Unspeakable Secrets": The Ideology of Landscape in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"

perience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case."2 Yet, there is equally a highly important sense in which the Congo of Heart of Darkness is not the Congo of any history book. That is to say, the apparently innocent activity of source-hunting masks a number of serious methodological problems. Perhaps the most important of these can be broached by invoking Con...

The Power of Geographical Visualizations

Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth and when I found one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, ‘When I grow up I will go there’. (Joseph Co...