The Political Novel: Edwin Frank on Joseph Conrad

Four one-hour sessions: October 6, 13, 20, 27. All sessions will start at 7pm EDT. Memberships begin at $119 (excluding Eventbrite fees). Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.

Politics fascinated and appalled Joseph Conrad, the child of Polish revolutionaries and later a ship captain. For him, it was the defining blight of the modern world, whose dark peripheries he mapped in his greatest works, Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent. In the second seminar in our Political Novel series, we will focus on these three novels as expressions of Conrad's anti-political vision.

This course will use the Penguin Classics editions of our texts, which may be purchased using the following links: Heart of Darkness; Nostromo; The Secret Agent.

About Edwin Frank

Edwin Frank is editor of the NYRB Classics series and the author of Stranger than Fiction: The Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel.

About this series

We live in a political world, per Bob Dylan, and the song suggests that is not such a good thing. The modern novel grew up alongside the modern political world, and has kept a fascinated and incredulous eye on it for the last few centuries. In this seminar, Edwin Frank, editor of the NYRB Classics series and the author of Stranger than Fiction: The Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel, will look at three novelists—Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad, and Ursula K. Le Guin—and their different visions of politics.

In his six parliamentary (or Palliser) novels (1865-1880), the Victorian Trollope considers politics as a new profession, a distinctive dimension of national life, often questionable, not entirely respectable, full of the ambiguity natural to the human, but all things considered a force for the good.

Between 1899 and 1911, Joseph Conrad composed four prophetic novels (Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes) that charted the dark redoubts and central evils of the globalized modern world: colonialism, economic exploitation, terrorism, authoritarianism. For Conrad, politics was a dire disease, an inhumanity infecting both private and public life that threatened whatever humanity human beings laid claim to.

In The Dispossessed (1974), Ursula K. Le Guin, heir to the robust tradition of speculative political fiction initiated by H.G. Wells (The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau), examines the fate of an anarchist planet in an anarchic universe, posing in the starkest way the question that politics continues to struggle with: Who are "we"? What does it mean to be "us"?