Conrad, Heart of Darkness, & Coppola, Apocalypse Now
Slides and video recording of lecture from Christina Hendricks’ lecture on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Derek Gladwin’s lecture on Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, January 11, 2016.
The power of film
In Arts One this week we discussed Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. It was really challenging trying to talk about everything we wanted to discuss about both works, in two seminars (1 hr 20 minutes each, but still…). One thing I asked towards the end of class yesterday was something like: What […]
New videos posted: Conrad, Coppola, Achebe
New videos have been posted recently, but they are on posts from last year (we added the new lectures to already-existing posts on those texts). You can see a new lecture on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, by Robert Crawford, here: And a new one on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, by Derek Gladwin, here: And […]
Heart of Darkness
The first thing I noticed about Heart of Darkness is the unusual narrative. Although the story of Marlow is told through the lens of the narrator, it feels as though Marlow himself is the narrator. I then started to wonder the purpose of having Marlow narrating his own story in quotations; why not let the […]
Row, row, row your boat, gently down the AAAHH!!
Another depressing book, with no characters that are likeable and an ending that left me unsatisfied (just like Apocalypse Now!), leaving us with the sad image of a mourning widow being lied to. I’ve got to hope that Things Fall Apart is a light romant…
Humanity’s Heart of Darkness
Although I do see how could Conrad’s work be perceived as biased, principally due to what we would now consider as ethnocentrism (anthropology was still not a consolidated field at the time), I think Heart of Darkness is arguably one of the most powerful books written. Marlow’s descent into hell is representative of the rotten […]
Marlow’s Inconclusive Experiences
Two things have struck me when reading Heart of Darkness: (1) how much I’ve enjoyed it (maybe just because I can actually remember where my quotes are), and (2) how little I feel like I understand it. Having discussed it a year ago in English, I felt like I knew this book well enough – a slow moving and pointlessly despondent novel with colourful imagery that my teacher couldn’t let go of. Although a second reading has enhanced my opinion, I also feel a lot more confused by what I’ve…read more
Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness was one of the most interesting books I had to read in high school. My English teacher brought in her friend, who had taught/studied the book for many years, to go through the book chapter by chapter. He explained a lot about the book and Conrad’s life, information that was all briefly covered in lecture this week. Listening to […]
Heart Of Darkness post
Heart Of Darkness was one of the books I enjoyed reading most this year in arts one. For me at least, the plot and narration of the novel was one of the most absorbing of anything on the syllabus. I think part of the reason why I was so captivated was because of the ongoing […]
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
There were two questions that struck me particularly hard during today’s seminar: Should be be reading Heart of Darkness in Arts One at all, given its criticisms? Why are we blaming Conrad, who wrote in 1899, for not being more mindful of the social wrongs? The n-word is used in a surprisingly numerous amount of […]