September 28, 2008

Gene M. Moore. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, A Casebook. 2004.

Introduction speaks of Chinua Achebe's essay on Conrad, calling Conrad a "bloody racist."

However, introduction also notes that the words racist and racism did not exist in Conrad's life time - first instances recorded in the OED date from the 1930s and even their predecessor, racialism, was not use until 1907. So Conrad may well have been a racist but not aware of his actions as Achebe's insinuates.

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Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa." In Joseph Conrad: Third World Perspectives, edited by Robert Hamner, 1990.

September 26, 2008

Have been reading a book called Exterminate All the Brutes by Sven Lindqvist - explores genocide and questions if what happened in Germany was a unique case or just another episode along the continuum of European events.

Anyhow, I have a habit of looking at endnotes and came across some other items that may be of interest. Also, cross-referenced databases looking up Conrad & Kafka and came across some other books that piqued my interest.

Gene M. Moore
Heart of Darkness: A Casebook
PR6005 O4 H476 2004

William Randolph Mueller
Celebration of Life
PN3503 M76 1972
- series of essays including one on Conrad & Kafka

Edward Engelberg
The Unknown Distance: From Consciousness to Conscience, Goethe to Camus
PN56 S46 E5 1972

oppenheimer and the bomb

today i read about oppenheimer and the bomb, well at least an article about it

James A. Hijiya
The "Gita" of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 144, No. 2. (Jun., 2000), pp. 123-167.