AMC Colloquium on 2 March

AMC Colloquium: ‘Joseph Conrad and the Mechanism of Existence: Rethinking Agency in the Work of Edward Said’
Guest speaker: Nicolas Vandeviver, Ghent University

When: Wednesday 2 March 2016, 15.30-17.30
Where: GG 80-82 Attic

Abstract
The work of Edward Said is, according to most critics, characterized by a problematic and for some even conflicting view on human agency. At certain points Said seems to attribute agency to individual authors, at other points to pervasive hegemonic discourses like Orientalism or imperialism. In my presentation, I want to address the conceptualization of literature and agency in Said’s Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), a phenomenological reading of Conrad’s letters and short fiction. Said’s analysis of Conrad’s consciousness of consciousness is inspired by the phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, most importantly, Jean-Paul Sartre’s outline for a phenomenological theory of the emotions – a conceptual precursor of what may now be called ‘cognitive dissonance’. I will look into the incorporation and elaboration of these intertexts in Joseph Conrad. My argument is that Sartre’s theory of the emotions forms the backbone of Said’s analysis of Conrad’s activity as a writer and self-definition in relation to the ambient cultural constraints of his time. I argue that Said’s model of human agency – or what he calls the “mechanism of existence” (1966: 6) – can best be understood in relation to this theory. Thinking of Said’s conceptualization of agency in Sartrean terms is crucial. Not only does it elucidate the mechanism of existence and the role of literature in Joseph Conrad, it also helps us reevaluate the conceptualization of agency and the specific role of literary texts in Said’s most famous work Orientalism (1978).

Guest speaker: Nicolas Vandeviver
PhD Fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders
Department of Literary Studies, Ghent University, Belgium

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