Heart of Darkness: A Psychological Journey into the Heart of Darkness and the Human Soul -, Apuntes de Idiomas

¡Descarga Heart of Darkness: A Psychological Journey into the Heart of Darkness and the Human Soul - y más Apuntes en PDF de Idiomas solo en Docsity! Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” Topics for discussion Even if you don’t have completed the reading of this masterpiece, you will surely be familiar with it, or will have read some passages or critical review on it. Plea- se, share your views upon the following big issues which are central in the story. 1) How to define it? Conrad’s masterpiece can be defined not as a rite of passage, since the protagonist starts well in his adulthood, yet still as a psychological journey more than simply as a severe account of the imperialism of European colonies in Africa. 2) Could this be a real story? Is it possible to read the novel as an actual event, a real occurence? Is there any source of reality in it? 3) What is the story about? Identify its main topics within the telling of the plot. 4) Do we have more than one narrator? Who would this teller/s of the “yarn” be? 5) Have you been able to trace any evidence in the story that would allow us to consider it racist? Could be also characterized it as anti-racist, why? 6) Focus on the title. What do you think Heart of Darkness , both as a phrase and as a novel implies? Or, to put it otherwise, what is at the centre of this darkness? What are the main issues in the narrative, and how are light and darkness represented in it? Provide textual evidence. 7) The following excerpts are significative as representing what main topics central in HOD? Excerpt 1 "Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, de- serted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself An Introduction to literary texts in English, by J. Miras, Handouts. ! pg. 1