ルーツへの旅 : The Voyage of the Beagleにおける言語的ジレンマと"Heart of Darkness"のモダニズムについて
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In The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), the prosaic journey of research is reconstructed as a fascinating quest narrative that, by presenting non-European countries as a barbaric, primordial world, rhetorically confirms the superiority of Western civilization. However, such a racist belief is by no means unswerving. Its rhetorical strategy includes an emphasis on the linguistic immaturity of the non-European world. Counterposed with Darwin's scientific attitude by which the natural world is "read" like a language, this strategy certainly consolidates the preeminence of civilization. Yet, at the same time, the text unconsciously discloses a dilemma within its linguistic concern: the author's uneasiness, stirred by the vacant, inscrutable language of the Fuegians, in turn implies a deficiency in the Western language itself. "Heart of Darkness" (1902), which shares this structure of quest narrative, also poses a question about language as its central theme: Kurtz's eloquence, an object of Marlow's quest into central Africa, only reveals an immense hollow beneath its surface. There, the expected proof of an inviolable distinction between civilization and its roots receives a fatal blow. This is the thematic reappearance of a vague uneasiness embedded in a scientific text from sixty-three years before-this time as a more articulate skepticism. Such a critical perspective discloses how the roots of an early modernist text are located in one of Darwin's writings. This points to the possibility that modernism as a twentieth-century literary movement also ramifies an epistemological cataclysm brought about by the emergence of Darwinism in the middle of the nineteenth century.
- 関西学院大学の論文
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