2006 Media Releases
Wednesday 24 May 2006
NSW Premier’s Literary prize for La Trobe Conrad scholar
La Trobe University scholar and Head of Chisholm College, Terry Collits, yesterday won the $15, 000 biennial prize for literary scholarship in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards for his book on Joseph Conrad.
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 – renovating 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.
‘The interpretation and evaluation of Conrad’s work has been intensely, even bitterly, contested for at least eighty years. For a time, "Heart of Darkness" (on which Francis Ford Coppola loosely based his film Apocalypse Now) was treated almost as an “ur text” in the new disciplinary field.’
Mr Collits says 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.
‘His colonial novels, including 'Lord Jim' (1900), 'Nostromo' (1904) and 'Victory' (1915), represent - at the very moment of high imperialism - the most significant encounter recorded in canonical literature between Europe and Europe’s “Other”.’
One of their important insights 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. Others gradually found their way through those cracks … producers of high literature and middlebrow fiction, Hollywood makers of movies and a welter of travel writers, latter-day Western adventurers and Third World champions of Liberation, postcolonial intellectuals and some of the most renowned writers of the 20th century. All invoked Conrad as their guide.’
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 globalization, which tend to erase or otherwise incorporate all difference.’
‘In this context, the most rigorous judgements are likely to be attentively indeterminate. Conrad remains one of the best writers to work with on questions of indeterminacy.’
For further information:
Mr Collits can be contacted on Tel: 03 9479 2899 or Email: t.j.collits@latrobe.edu.au