Bulletin

Issue: June 2006

Books

Literary prize for Conrad scholar

La Trobe University scholar and Head of Chisholm College, Terry Collits, has won this year's $15, 000 biennial prize for literary scholarship in the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards for his book on Joseph Conrad.

NSW Arts Minister, Mr Bob Debus, left,
congratulates Mr Collits.

Conrad's insights into empire and the human heart made him one of the most important and debated western novelists of the 20th century.

An exotic author of political intrigue and adventure in the early 1900s, Conrad, by mid-century, had been canonised by the literary establishment, and then popularised to almost cult status in the radical latter decades. (Who can forget Marlon Brando's performance as Kurtz in the film Apocalypse Now!)

In his award-winning new book, Postcolonial Conrad: Paradoxes of Empire, Mr Collits has now opened a fourth phase - reconsidering Conrad for the 21st century.

The award judges praised the book as an 'excellent study' of the writings of Joseph Conrad from a postcolonial perspective. They said the book also highlighted the tragic contradiction inherent in the idea of 'self' where 'goals of civilization are contradicted both by primitive drives and remorseless law'.

Mr Collits says Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) ranks with Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, as two of the most significant books published at the turn of the 20th century.

However, institutional and cultural changes have 'radically affected the ways in which canonical writers are read in universities today. No other novelist of his time has been affected as drastically as Conrad by those shifts'.

One of the important insights of Conrad's colonial novels is that the highest point of Europe's imperial success might also be its lowest in terms of moral authority. 'In retrospect, that contradiction appears to foreshadow the demise of the European empires,' he says.

Mr Collits adds that in their 'angular relationship to empire, these novels mull over cracks in the edifice of imperial ideology instead of celebrating its magnificence.' The world imperial system of Conrad's time, says Mr Collits, has echoes 'in the late-twentieth-century vision of a new world order based on inexorable processes of globalisation, which tend to erase or otherwise incorporate all difference.'

In his acceptance speech, Mr Collits dedicated his award 'to those numberless English teachers whose task it is to find new ways of presenting the "classics" to contemporary readers who live in cultural conditions very different from those in which their grandparents lived - or in which some politicians seem to imagine they are still living'.

He added: 'The day the short-list for these awards was announced, The Australian newspaper began one of their regular "cultural values" scandals, this time over the fact that Sydney Church of England Girls Grammar School (of all places!) had set an essay question on Shakespeare's Othello asking for a Marxist, postcolonial, or feminist reading of the play.

'The usual suspects invited by the paper to respond saw this as the beginning of the end of the culture as we know it.

Amazingly, the Prime Minister himself weighed in on the side of the anxious conservatives. My question is a simple one: "Why do I feel uneasy when the Prime Minister intervenes over an English essay question set at a prominent girls' private school?"'