Conrad and the Being of the World: A Reading in Speculative Metaphysics

Why is it that many readers sense in Joseph Conrad’s universe something opaque and withdrawn, a suggestive feeling of something lying behind his richly textured prose that is possibly momentous, always hidden, but never fully expressed? This unique study explores and answers this question by analysing Conrad’s work through the lens of Object-Oriented Ontology, a new development in contemporary philosophy that has already been employed to illuminating effect in aesthetics and the humanities, quite apart from philosophy itself. What results from such a literary and philosophical coupling is a persuasive reading with real explanatory force, one able to shed light on what has remained hidden in Conrad till now, at the same time as it articulates a metaphysical structure of not just Conrad’s world but the universe itself and the very things we are-and what we take ourselves to be.