Space, Conrad, and Modernity

Recent literary and cultural criticism has taken a spatial turn. Nowadays, to speak is to speak from, to, or in; to know something is to have "mapped" its discursive operation. Focusing on the work of Joseph Conrad, in whom the opposition between a space of words and a space of things is strikingly figured, this book locates this development within the opposition between a space of things and a space of words. Among the figures drawn into dialogue with Conrad are John Buchan, Woolf, Joyce, Peter Kropotkin, René de Saussure (brother of the famous Ferdinand), Henri Bergson, the filmmakers George Méliès and Carol Reed and, in particular, Michel Foucault, whose anxious negotiation with spatial ideas touches the book's deepest understanding.