Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2020.1851341
T. Clark, R. Lucas, E. Palmer
ABSTRACT This is a ‘research editorial.’ It expounds the curatorial values that inform editing decisions for the Journal of Language Literature and Culture in 2020, setting them in a context of current scholarly debates and culture. Its main contribution to knowledge is also the JLLC’s main contribution: to embody the active recognition of the importance of a plenary function for journals such as this one. The article frames scholarly practices as balancing a value or ethos of plenitude against the alternative norms of scholarly specialisation, where each function is critical to the viability of the whole. Within that balance, a journal such as JLLC is needed for its capacity to convene scholarly discussions that span the fields of Language, Literature, and Culture. It underscores the importance for our diverse scholarly community of taking an interest in each other’s work, publishing articles that are framed generously, to reach out to readers who are curious beyond an author’s specialised field.
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Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2020.1849947
Paddy Gordon
ABSTRACT This paper contends that much of the discourse produced, received and exchanged online by ‘progressive subjects’ – activists committed to contesting oppression and examining privilege – is structured by neoliberal ideology. Human capital theory functions as the ‘interpellative arm’ of the neoliberal project, and a subject conceived as human capital is neoliberalism's discursive mark. Via the articulation and application of an innovative reading method, this paper explores some political ramifications of the neoliberal structuration of ‘progressive discourse’ in the very recent past, recognising that the relationship between subjects and discourse is complex and dialectical. This paper’s methodology is two-pronged. A method of reading for the presence of human capital theory is articulated, with six distinct markers of a subject conceived as human capital established. The reading method produces data that supports this paper’s contention: many forms of progressive discourse unwittingly reproduce neoliberal norms via the production of a subject as human capital as ‘the subject of the discourse’. Indeed, neoliberal human capital theory is a structural determinant of the progressive discourse analysed via the reading method demonstrated in this paper.
{"title":"The Subject of the Discourse: Reading Online Activist Discourse for Human Capital Theory","authors":"Paddy Gordon","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2020.1849947","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2020.1849947","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper contends that much of the discourse produced, received and exchanged online by ‘progressive subjects’ – activists committed to contesting oppression and examining privilege – is structured by neoliberal ideology. Human capital theory functions as the ‘interpellative arm’ of the neoliberal project, and a subject conceived as human capital is neoliberalism's discursive mark. Via the articulation and application of an innovative reading method, this paper explores some political ramifications of the neoliberal structuration of ‘progressive discourse’ in the very recent past, recognising that the relationship between subjects and discourse is complex and dialectical. This paper’s methodology is two-pronged. A method of reading for the presence of human capital theory is articulated, with six distinct markers of a subject conceived as human capital established. The reading method produces data that supports this paper’s contention: many forms of progressive discourse unwittingly reproduce neoliberal norms via the production of a subject as human capital as ‘the subject of the discourse’. Indeed, neoliberal human capital theory is a structural determinant of the progressive discourse analysed via the reading method demonstrated in this paper.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":"67 1","pages":"124 - 142"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2020.1849947","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47396625","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2020.1735041
Fatemeh Abdous, Fazel Asadi Amjad
ABSTRACT The British dramatist David Hare (1947–) is a distinguished contemporary figure in the field of historical-political playwriting. To address the issues of his age, he makes use of history and the recent past as a model. Like Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), the twentieth-century political theorist and activist, Hare conducts a pathological study of his surrounding environment and the world. Both Arendt and Hare benefit from the past, Arendt from the distant past or the ancient Greece and Rome and Hare from the immediate past, in order to understand the present better. Indeed, history is a source of inspiration to them both. This paper is a study of Hare’s historical-political play, Fanshen, based on Arendt’s political insights on action and public and private realms. The play mainly shows that, contrary to Arendt – for whom the public realm of politics and the private domain of economy are two separate fields – for Hare there is essentially an interconnection between public and private spheres.
{"title":"David Hare’s Fanshen and Hannah Arendt’s Political Views on Action and Public and Private Realms","authors":"Fatemeh Abdous, Fazel Asadi Amjad","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2020.1735041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2020.1735041","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The British dramatist David Hare (1947–) is a distinguished contemporary figure in the field of historical-political playwriting. To address the issues of his age, he makes use of history and the recent past as a model. Like Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), the twentieth-century political theorist and activist, Hare conducts a pathological study of his surrounding environment and the world. Both Arendt and Hare benefit from the past, Arendt from the distant past or the ancient Greece and Rome and Hare from the immediate past, in order to understand the present better. Indeed, history is a source of inspiration to them both. This paper is a study of Hare’s historical-political play, Fanshen, based on Arendt’s political insights on action and public and private realms. The play mainly shows that, contrary to Arendt – for whom the public realm of politics and the private domain of economy are two separate fields – for Hare there is essentially an interconnection between public and private spheres.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":"67 1","pages":"61 - 75"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2020.1735041","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41798855","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2020.1735037
N. Jayendran
ABSTRACT This paper explores the politics of space, freedom and creativity through the prism of novelistic discourse in Margaret Atwood’s novel Hag-Seed (2016), which is a twenty-first-century adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest (1610–1611). Hag-Seed, set in a Canadian prison, narrates the revenge orchestrated by the protagonist Felix on his antagonists Tony and Sal. Felix, an instructor in a prison-reform programme called the Fletcher’s Correctional Program where he teaches Shakespeare to the inmates, asks them to predict the future of the characters in The Tempest. The prisoners demonstrate agentivity as they bring their individual perspectives to bear on their interpretations. This paper locates its analysis within one such interpretation provided by the prisoners, and Felix’s interpretation of bondage and freedom within creative spaces, based on the words ‘Set me free’ uttered by Shakespeare’s Prospero in The Tempest. Can freedom exist as a discourse without the accompanying discourse of bondage? How does creativity within sub/cultural spaces mediate agentivity? The trope of prison shapes discourses on space and creativity in Hag-Seed. By considering the interpretations generated by the prisoners and the novelistic discourse, I explore the politics of creativity as moderated within and through the discourse of space, and its implications for freedom.
{"title":"‘Set Me Free': Spaces and the Politics of Creativity in Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (2016)","authors":"N. Jayendran","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2020.1735037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2020.1735037","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper explores the politics of space, freedom and creativity through the prism of novelistic discourse in Margaret Atwood’s novel Hag-Seed (2016), which is a twenty-first-century adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest (1610–1611). Hag-Seed, set in a Canadian prison, narrates the revenge orchestrated by the protagonist Felix on his antagonists Tony and Sal. Felix, an instructor in a prison-reform programme called the Fletcher’s Correctional Program where he teaches Shakespeare to the inmates, asks them to predict the future of the characters in The Tempest. The prisoners demonstrate agentivity as they bring their individual perspectives to bear on their interpretations. This paper locates its analysis within one such interpretation provided by the prisoners, and Felix’s interpretation of bondage and freedom within creative spaces, based on the words ‘Set me free’ uttered by Shakespeare’s Prospero in The Tempest. Can freedom exist as a discourse without the accompanying discourse of bondage? How does creativity within sub/cultural spaces mediate agentivity? The trope of prison shapes discourses on space and creativity in Hag-Seed. By considering the interpretations generated by the prisoners and the novelistic discourse, I explore the politics of creativity as moderated within and through the discourse of space, and its implications for freedom.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":"14 1","pages":"15 - 27"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2020.1735037","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41300507","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2020.1735038
Kevin A. Morrison
ABSTRACT While much has been written about Charles Dickens’s figuration of the daughter as a means of salvation for the capitalist father in Dombey and Son, the figure of the pet, which bears enormous ideological weight, is underanalysed. Attending to the style, content, and purposes of the symbolic and psychic economy of the pet, I argue that the distinction of public and private on which Dickens relies is interchangeable with another dichotomy he labours to establish between the untamed and the domestic. Examined from this angle, the novel’s chief concern is with the possibility of becoming human - that is to say domesticated - within a relentlessly feral world. It is through intersubjectivity that the stray canine becomes Diogenes the pet, a process that prefigures, and as I will show intimately related to, Paul Dombey’s own metamorphosis.
{"title":"Becoming Human: Dombey and Son and the Economy of the Pet","authors":"Kevin A. Morrison","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2020.1735038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2020.1735038","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT While much has been written about Charles Dickens’s figuration of the daughter as a means of salvation for the capitalist father in Dombey and Son, the figure of the pet, which bears enormous ideological weight, is underanalysed. Attending to the style, content, and purposes of the symbolic and psychic economy of the pet, I argue that the distinction of public and private on which Dickens relies is interchangeable with another dichotomy he labours to establish between the untamed and the domestic. Examined from this angle, the novel’s chief concern is with the possibility of becoming human - that is to say domesticated - within a relentlessly feral world. It is through intersubjectivity that the stray canine becomes Diogenes the pet, a process that prefigures, and as I will show intimately related to, Paul Dombey’s own metamorphosis.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":"67 1","pages":"28 - 44"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2020.1735038","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45598429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2020.1735032
Baole Cheng, Junwu Tian
ABSTRACT Parody is regarded as a ‘beside-or-against’ song. Based on the theories of parody and intertextuality, this paper analyses the parodic means adopted in Umberto Eco’s short story ‘Granita,’ which is meant to be a parody of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The study proceeds from three aspects: parody as imitation, parody as reconstruction and intertextuality as text of pleasure and jouissance. The imitation can be reflected through creation of characters, rhetorical devices, narrative strategy and arrangement of plots. The reconstruction is realised through readers’ unfulfilled expectations and intertextual interpretations. The text of bliss is embodied in readers’ decoding of the signifieds of the two texts from the signifiers of the phonological, lexical, textual and cultural layers. By parodying Nabokov’s Lolita, Eco aims to criticise the hypocrisy and absurdity of modern world, and at the same time, to affirm the aesthetic beauty of art.
{"title":"Parody of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita in Umberto Eco’s ‘Granita’","authors":"Baole Cheng, Junwu Tian","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2020.1735032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2020.1735032","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Parody is regarded as a ‘beside-or-against’ song. Based on the theories of parody and intertextuality, this paper analyses the parodic means adopted in Umberto Eco’s short story ‘Granita,’ which is meant to be a parody of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The study proceeds from three aspects: parody as imitation, parody as reconstruction and intertextuality as text of pleasure and jouissance. The imitation can be reflected through creation of characters, rhetorical devices, narrative strategy and arrangement of plots. The reconstruction is realised through readers’ unfulfilled expectations and intertextual interpretations. The text of bliss is embodied in readers’ decoding of the signifieds of the two texts from the signifiers of the phonological, lexical, textual and cultural layers. By parodying Nabokov’s Lolita, Eco aims to criticise the hypocrisy and absurdity of modern world, and at the same time, to affirm the aesthetic beauty of art.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":"67 1","pages":"1 - 14"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2020.1735032","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46322658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2020.1735039
Haiyan Xie
ABSTRACT The notion of nostalgia always implies a sense of discontinuity and dissatisfaction with the present, but it does not always move towards resistance. Based on a close reading of Chinese writer Yan Lianke’s novel Dingzhuang meng 丁庄梦 (Dream of Ding Village), this paper identifies a latent counternarrative of nostalgia, working against the novel’s dominant narrative, which mourns the collapse of familial and social ethics in the wake of socialist developmentalism. Specifically, it argues the novel invokes a nostalgic imagining of traditional Confucian familial ethics, manifested both in Ding Hui’s ambiguous filial piety and the paradox of Ding Liang and Lingling’s adultery and desire for mingfen 名分 (normative status). This latent nostalgic imagining works as a form of depoliticization that subtly undermines the dominant narrative of the piece, implicitly dilutes the potency of the socio-political critique surrounding the AIDS scandal, and suspends a definitive interpretation of Yan’s critical position. This undermining of socio-political criticism and tendency toward nostalgic longing places Yan in a self-contradictory position, implying an unresolved conflict between his desire for withdrawal from a fallen world and his uncertainty about the capacity of traditional values to reshape the moral fabric of the post-socialist society.
{"title":"Nostalgia as Method: Contamination of Blood and Familial Ethics in Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village","authors":"Haiyan Xie","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2020.1735039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2020.1735039","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The notion of nostalgia always implies a sense of discontinuity and dissatisfaction with the present, but it does not always move towards resistance. Based on a close reading of Chinese writer Yan Lianke’s novel Dingzhuang meng 丁庄梦 (Dream of Ding Village), this paper identifies a latent counternarrative of nostalgia, working against the novel’s dominant narrative, which mourns the collapse of familial and social ethics in the wake of socialist developmentalism. Specifically, it argues the novel invokes a nostalgic imagining of traditional Confucian familial ethics, manifested both in Ding Hui’s ambiguous filial piety and the paradox of Ding Liang and Lingling’s adultery and desire for mingfen 名分 (normative status). This latent nostalgic imagining works as a form of depoliticization that subtly undermines the dominant narrative of the piece, implicitly dilutes the potency of the socio-political critique surrounding the AIDS scandal, and suspends a definitive interpretation of Yan’s critical position. This undermining of socio-political criticism and tendency toward nostalgic longing places Yan in a self-contradictory position, implying an unresolved conflict between his desire for withdrawal from a fallen world and his uncertainty about the capacity of traditional values to reshape the moral fabric of the post-socialist society.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":"67 1","pages":"45 - 60"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2020.1735039","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45041803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2019.1679448
Jina Moon
ABSTRACT Wilkie Collins’s Man and Wife (1870) has notoriously been criticised by both Victorian and contemporary reviewers for its seeming oversimplified antagonism toward athleticism and sport. However, Man and Wife provides profound insights into the debates and anxieties of the time regarding the cultivation of physical prowess in conjunction with British imperialism. Collins’s antagonism represents a view into Victorian discourse on the unprecedented vogue of athleticism, which made England the first modern sporting nation. This essay argues that Collins became a representative antagonist against athleticism due to his concerns about the decline of intelligence, morality, and even health combined with a concern about the popularity of amateur sports, which served as a means to segregate class. Collins’s controversial portrayal of an aristocrat’s excellence in sports was a warning against elite athleticism, which went against the Victorian current of class mobility. Analysing discourses on athleticism in Victorian periodicals and magazines, this essay offers insights into the shifting contours of sporting ethos and class identity in mid- to late Victorian society and into British endeavours to strengthen its economic and national power by adopting an innovative practice of athleticism.
{"title":"Athletic Antagonism in Wilkie Collins’s Man and Wife","authors":"Jina Moon","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2019.1679448","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2019.1679448","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Wilkie Collins’s Man and Wife (1870) has notoriously been criticised by both Victorian and contemporary reviewers for its seeming oversimplified antagonism toward athleticism and sport. However, Man and Wife provides profound insights into the debates and anxieties of the time regarding the cultivation of physical prowess in conjunction with British imperialism. Collins’s antagonism represents a view into Victorian discourse on the unprecedented vogue of athleticism, which made England the first modern sporting nation. This essay argues that Collins became a representative antagonist against athleticism due to his concerns about the decline of intelligence, morality, and even health combined with a concern about the popularity of amateur sports, which served as a means to segregate class. Collins’s controversial portrayal of an aristocrat’s excellence in sports was a warning against elite athleticism, which went against the Victorian current of class mobility. Analysing discourses on athleticism in Victorian periodicals and magazines, this essay offers insights into the shifting contours of sporting ethos and class identity in mid- to late Victorian society and into British endeavours to strengthen its economic and national power by adopting an innovative practice of athleticism.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":"66 1","pages":"157 - 173"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2019.1679448","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41553705","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2019.1679444
F. Fang, Keith Dickson
ABSTRACT Chinese myths of Shen Nong (神农), the ‘Farmer God’ and inventor of pharmacology, evince a pattern evidenced elsewhere in the corpus of world myths. This is the pattern in which an ancestral body functions as a transformative space into which raw, dangerous stuff enters and from which it re-emerges as wholesome food or medicine. The same pattern appears in the Sumero-Babylonian myth of the trickster god Enki, likewise patron of both agriculture and herbal healing. A comparison of relevant myths from these two cultures throws light on the nature of traditional cosmologies, and especially on the place of the human body at the centre of a network of analogies in whose terms an understanding of the world is constructed.
{"title":"Enki, Shen Nong, and the Alembic Body","authors":"F. Fang, Keith Dickson","doi":"10.1080/20512856.2019.1679444","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20512856.2019.1679444","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Chinese myths of Shen Nong (神农), the ‘Farmer God’ and inventor of pharmacology, evince a pattern evidenced elsewhere in the corpus of world myths. This is the pattern in which an ancestral body functions as a transformative space into which raw, dangerous stuff enters and from which it re-emerges as wholesome food or medicine. The same pattern appears in the Sumero-Babylonian myth of the trickster god Enki, likewise patron of both agriculture and herbal healing. A comparison of relevant myths from these two cultures throws light on the nature of traditional cosmologies, and especially on the place of the human body at the centre of a network of analogies in whose terms an understanding of the world is constructed.","PeriodicalId":40530,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Language Literature and Culture","volume":"66 1","pages":"119 - 133"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20512856.2019.1679444","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45533393","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-02DOI: 10.1080/20512856.2019.1679449
Ahmed Ben Amara
ABSTRACT That Heart of Darkness continues to generate multiple critical responses owes to a large extent to the text's endemic ambivalence. Conrad's tendency to remain inconclusive, what Harold Bloom calls his ‘unique propensity for ambiguity'1, has received a great deal of critical attention, and its ideological and moral foundations have been thoroughly analysed. However, the possibility that the text's indeterminacies may have their origins in the psychological conflicts of its central narrator has not been sufficiently addressed. This paper draws upon Cathy Caruth's pioneering work on trauma and testimony, to argue that the fragmentation in Marlow's narrative is the result of a psychological crisis that is caused not by direct exposure to violence, but by witnessing someone else's trauma. Having come into contact with Kurtz's disturbing story, Marlow steps in the position of the confused listener, and his story becomes the fragmentary account of a traumatised subject. By shifting attention from the shocking events of the novella to the narrator's predicament as he attempts to bear witness to Kurtz's trauma, one would begin to address another enigmatic aspect of the trauma in the text – how the encounter with someone’s psychic wound can lead to the traumatisation of the witness.
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