Discussion Topics for Friday
In the context of Heart of Darkness and Red Harvest consider these rather grand (perhaps grandiose) questions for Friday's class:
1. What is at the Heart of (a) Civilization, (b) the Individual, (c) language and eloquence, (d) Idealism, (e) The notion of divinity?
2. Is the Jungle Eden or is it the terror of the Abyss? Is the urban world the jungle of the civilized world? Is the Jungle the dark Heart within or a place for new things to thrive?
3. Is Rhetoric and eloquence a kind of Faustian bargain? Is language a gift that disguises the inner darkness?
4. Conrad's text calls attention to its many possible understandings of people and culture and nature in ways that seem never to resolve-- not in a post-modern sense, but in an artistic multivalent narrative perspective. Hammett's world seems a plain, realistic text in comparison. Should a text yield a cogent and coherent perspective, or is realty richly contradictory.
5. How do outward events reveal deeper, perhaps unintended, meanings and motives?
6. Is there some stable perspective to allow real judgment?
7. Does language always seduce us into belief we otherwise doubt/