Kingsley Widmer

Bio: Kingsley Widmer is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Skepticism & Morality. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 2 publications receiving 13 citations.

Conrad's Pyrrhonistic Conservativism: Ideological Melodrama around "Simple Ideas"

Abstract: Much of the effect of "modernist culture," including what we now recognize as the major literature between, say, the mid-nineteenth century and World War II, was in the undercutting of the accepted moral and social order. Inherited hierarchies and pieties lost their sanctity under the disenchanted probings of our literature and art and critical intelligence. Moral and political and religious authority were inexorably separated not only from claims to immutable truth but to any lesser legitimacy. Part of this was due to the double-edged equalities of modernist sensibility-its intellectual anti-intellectualism, its radicalness even when conservative in cast, its stern fidelity to the heterodox and subterranean and subversive. Thus much of our authentic interest in modernism is in the sensibility of negation. More emphatically put, much of the glory of modernist literature rests on its nihilism. The place of Joseph Conrad in that modernism may rightly be viewed as a perplexing one. He was simultaneously one of the most nihilistic and anti-nihilistic of artists, deploring while yet demanding the negative, homeopathically countering alienation and destruction and despair with doses of the same. He arrives at this from drastic doubt-"like most men of little faith," as he described himself in one of his letters, and with "scepticism. . . the agent of truth," as he insisted in another. It is a cosmic doubt frequently shading over into cosmic malevolence, or, as that striking phrase from The Heart of Darkness puts it, our world is "that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose." This skepticism is more than temperament and avowal; it is the very manner of Conrad's art with its circling forms, its labyrinthine narrative removals, its self-conscious countering of realistic and romantic polarities, its peculiar exaltation of evil chance, and its frequently riddling and contradictory rhetoric. Yet such drastic doubt is put at the service of simple conservative moral claims. The art must often make the morality pyrrhic. Conrad's characteristic style surrounds his subjects in most elaborate ways while yet insisting on what he liked to call their "mysteries." He rather over-favored the "unfathomable" and "inscrutable," the unknowable heart of the matter, in his insistence upon skepticism. Yet he obsessively portrayed hollow heroes, those without resilience and other resources than self-destruction, without heart. Simple goodness of character becomes our only defense against the "cosmic chaos" but, as Marlow tells Jewel in Lord Jim, "Nobody, nobody is good enough."

New essays on Billy Budd

Abstract: Introduction Donald Yannella 1. Melville's indirection: Billy Budd, the Genetic text, and 'the deadly space between' John Wenke 2. Billy Budd and American labour unrest: the case for striking back Larry J. Reynolds 3. Religion, myth and meaning in the art of Billy Budd, Sailor Gail Coffler 4. Old man Melville: the rose and the cross R. Milder Selected Bibliography.

New Essays on Billy Budd : Melville's indirection: Billy Budd , the genetic text, and “the deadly space between”

Abstract: While assembling officers for a drumhead court, Captain Vere includes a marine and “perhaps deviated from general custom.” The marine's “judicious” and “thoughtful” attributes make him “not altogether incapable of grappling with a difficult case.” Vere, however, is “not without some latent misgiving.” An “extremely good-natured man,” the marine is “an enjoyer of his dinner, a sound sleeper, and inclined to obesity.” A late pencil patch added to the fair-copy inscription further qualifies his character: “though he would always maintain his manhood in battle [he] might not prove altogether reliable in a moral dilemma involving aught of the tragic.” The immediate impression of Vere's approbation dissolves: To be “not altogether incapable” makes one not quite capable. Perhaps Vere has grounds for reservation. But then again, one wonders, why is Vere, conservative champion of “forms, measured forms” (Chap. 27, leaf 333), deviating from custom in the first place? This revised passage signals the critical complexities attending Billy Budd , especially insofar as it depicts competing claims to interpretive authority. The narrator may be presenting Vere's prescient distrust of his supposed coadjudicators or his invidious tendency toward narrow self-righteousness. Is Captain Vere the just and sane man he believes himself to be, “no lover of authority for mere authority's sake,” one loathe to monopolize “the perils of moral responsibility” (Chap. 21, leaf 244)?

‘Modern,’ ‘Postmodern’ and ‘Contemporary’ as Criteria for the Analysis of 20th Century Literature

Abstract: A systematic survey of the theories concerning the terms ‘modern,’ postmodern’ and ‘contemporary’ reveals the wide range of different approaches in search of categories for the analysis of 20th century literature. Two fundamental positions emerge: on the one hand a discontinuity between ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ analogous to the structural opposition of two different principles of integration: subjectivity and absence of subjectivity; on the other hand a continuity from ‘modern’ to ‘postmodern’ as a logical further development. The modern writers’ subjective sensibility creates highly structured artifacts with new forms and techniques as a reflex reaction to the inhuman aspects of modern industrial society; postmodern writers, in a dual process of physical reduction and spiritual expansion, move away from all thematic or formal constraints, giving themselves up to the anarchy of pure imagination. ‘Contemporary’ is used as a loose term for a literature critical of social conditions; it fits into neither the ‘modern’ nor the ‘postmodern’ category. While ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ can serve as models of explanation for the categorization of literature, such terms as ‘contemporary’ and ‘avant-garde’ are bound to an historical context and resist any practical systematization.