Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about the life and work of Joseph Conrad, with a focus on his novel of anarchism and terrorism, The Secret Agent. I first discuss Conrad’s biography: his harrowing childhood as the son of a Polish nationalist under Russian occupation; his seafaring years in the merchant marine amid the industrial revolution in sailing from wind to steam power; and his gradual rise to prominence as a major novelist in British and world letters. I make several remarks about Heart of Darkness, his most famous work, and about his sometimes controversial reception by writers, critics, and biographers like Chinua Achebe, Edward Said, and Maya Jasanoff, while also emphasizing his enormous influence on British, American, and postcolonial literature. I then turn to Conrad’s own modernist manifesto of l’art pour l’art as applied to the art of the novel. Then I contextualize Conrad’s thriller The Secret Agent in the history of anarchism and terrorism in the late 19th century. Finally, I offer a reading of this novel stressing its satire on radicalism and radical chic, its formal assault on the standardization of time and the fetishism of science, its depiction of murderous freedom and redemptive empire, its atopic portrait of the placeless and denationalized modern city, and its dueling visions of the nihilist terrorist and the compassionate idiot as exemplary modern artists. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.
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