1. British Empire-Building

•      Atlantic Slave Trade (1650 - 1900): up to 28 million central & west Africans captured & driven to coasts to be sold as slaves

•      1450 and 1850: at least 12 million Africans were shipped from Africa to New World--notorious "Middle Passage“ (20% mortality rate)

•      Mid-18^th C.  British-French wars for control of India (Robt. Clive & British East India Co.)

2. British Empire-Building

•      1789: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustava Vassa = slave narrative fuels anti-slavery movement

•      1792: Slave uprising in Haiti led by Toussant L'Ouverture 
up to 55,000 blacks wage guerrilla & frontal war against British for years.

•      1795 - 1818: British seize control of Cape Colony, South Africa, from Dutch, declare control & increase Brit. immigration; Dutch Boers move inland & seize land

3. Abolition & Colonization

•      1833:  British abolish slavery in West Indies.

•      1839-1842: Amistad revolt (basis of 1997 Spielberg film) launches intense legal, political, popular debate over slavery in U.S.

•      1857-1858: Sepoy “Mutiny” – British Crown takes over India

•      1863:  Emancipation of slaves in U.S. amid Civil War.

•      1876-77: Queen Victoria declared Empress of India

4. Exploration & Colonization

•      C18 & C19: European political, economic, scientific interests fuel search for new markets & exploration

•      Stage set for European “Scramble for Africa” – 1870s

•      1770: James Bruce (Brit.) reaches source of Blue Nile

•      1795 & 1805: Mungo Park (Scot.) explores Niger River

•      1855: David Livingstone (Scot.) explores Zambezi River & names Victoria Falls

5. Exploration, Imperialism & Racism

•      1863:  British explorers Speke & James Augustus Grant, traveling downstream, & Sir Samuel White Baker, working upstream, locate sources of Nile

•      Christian missionaries & European merchants come with European explorers

•      View of Africans: "primitive, pre-literate, undeveloped” a/c Eurocentric theories of evolution of civilized culture.

6. Mountains of the Moon (1989/90 – rated R) – video clip

•     1850s – East Africa:  Capt. Richard F. Burton (Patrick Bergin) & Lt. John Hanning Speke (Iain Glen), funded by British Royal Geographical Society, set out to discover the source of the Nile: “balanced, uncolonial look at the variety, dignity & ferocity of African society”(-Rita Kempley, Washington Post, 23 Mar. 1990)

•      Dir. Bob Rafelson, based on Wm Harrison’s biography Burton & Speke,  Burton’s & Speke’s journals

7.           [Map of Africa & Photo of Joseph Conrad (b. 1857-d. 1914)]:

Marlow’s & Conrad’s 1889-90 Journey into “Heart of Darkness”

8.  Early Modernism & Heart of Darkness

•      Social breakdown, fragmentation: lose faith in progress, science, religion, politics, bourgeois morality

•      Alienation from urban bureaucratic society, a sterile, materialistic “waste land”

•      Question, challenge structures  of human life--e.g. Christianity-challenged as “convenient fictions” created to impose order, meaning on random, senseless, violent world

9.  Personal & Collective Crisis

•      Mid-1870s “Scramble for Africa”

•      1876-1884: King Leopold II (r. Belgium, 1865-1909) uses Stanley to explore, acquire, colonize “Congo Free State” as his personal possession

•      1885 Berlin Conference European powers divide up Africa

•      1889-90: Conrad goes to Congo & captains river steamboat to retrieve Klein; trauma & illness haunt him the rest of his life

10.  Heart of Darkness = Harrowing Critique of  Western Colonialism

•      1899, 1902: Heart of Darkness exposes predatory European Colonialism & its atrocities

•      Brussels = “whited sepulchre”; hypocrisy of  hollow ideals: “civilizing mission” & “White Man’s Burden

•      Public opinion turns against “jingoism” (e.g Rudyard Kipling)

•      1908: Leopold II loses Congo to Belgian government

•      1960: Belgian Congo achieves independence

11.  Mythic Journey

•      Unsettling global correspondences in world “myths” & rituals: e.g. Frazer’s Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (1890) & Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (Fisher king)

•      Carl Jung (1875-1961): all humans share common spiritual/ psychic heritage: collective unconscious, racial memories, archetypes emerge in dreams, myth/religion, art & literature

12.  “Psychological” Novel

•      Freud (1856-1939): feeling, unconscious, inward journey into self, back into past/ childhood keys to understanding human nature/behavior

•      Psychoanalytical method: healing through storytelling 

•      Focus: mental life, perceptions of story teller and his search for meaning (vs. tale itself)

•      inward journey into dream/nightmare world of irrational “uncontrollable” unconscious

13.  Experimental Forms for Multiple “Realities” of Uncertainty

•      flow of consciousness & memory structures narrative: associative (vs. linear) “logic” intertwines present awareness & memory

•      Interior monologue, “stream of consciousness, flashforward/ flash-back

•      Narrative frame

•      Marlow’s 1st-person “limited” narration: discontinuous/fragmented, suggestive/evocative, a-rational connections, introspective

14.  Challenges for Readers

•      Narrator/author suggests/evokes, does not explain; personal symbol system

•      new, previously forbidden subjects

•      unsettle readers’ expectations; shock out of complacency

•      Open-ended, ironic, multi-layered, “inconclusive”

•      Process/search/journey meaningful in itself (even if goal never reached)

•      Reader must be active co-creator of meaning: “emplot” life

15.  The “Contract”

•      Audience must agree to “play” the imaginative game (“suspend disbelief”)

•      Atwood: “...your life as the writer of each particular story is only as long, and as good, as the story itself.”

•      The “speaking voice” mediates reader-listener’s access to the story, but it is …

•      “double-voiced” dialogue (Bakhtin) between teller & listener each with active roles in making meaning.

16.  Genre Theory (> Aristotle)

•      Genre (>French): a type of literary work with defining conventions & audience expectations

•      Genres develop in response to particular cultural, communi-cation, & creative situations

•      Literary genres evolve like social institutions: their conventions/codes emerge, develop, & change over time, reflecting the (changing) values, imagination, spirit of an age, culture, artist

17.  Genre History:  Dialogues with Tradition

“Once you start making...rules, some writer will be sure to happen along and break every abstract rule you or anyone else ever thought up, and take your breath away in the process. The word should is… dangerous. …It’s a kind of challenge to the deviousness and inventive-ness and audacity and perversity of the creative spirit” --Margaret Atwood

18.  “High” Modernism: Early 20th century – Post -WW I

•     Decline of West:  Catastrophe of WWI shook faith in Western civilization & its cultural values

•     Radical break from traditional structures of Western culture & art

•     Artists sought new forms to render contemporary disorder & alienation