Heart of Darkness – Heart of Redness: Heartache and Pain in two Commonwealth Novels

• Authors: Ana-Maria Ştefan
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Our study is conceived as a comparative analysis of Zakes Mda’s postcolonial and postmodern novel The Heart of Redness and Joseph Conrad’s canonical and colonial novella Heart of Darkness, from the viewpoint of a literarily encoded anthropology of the body. In both texts, body marks and body pain are prominent and recurrent motives, carrying along important cultural meanings, related to several classic themes of colonial and postcolonial literature: the birth and becoming of cultural identity and awareness, culture shock, cultural contacts, enculturation versus deculturation, and cultural memory, as a vehicle and repository of myths, history and (body) image stereotypes.

Keywords

EN

colonialism; postcolonialism; body pain; body marks; corporeality; “redness” versus “darkness”; identity; memory; cultural contact; cultural stereotypes (self- and hetero-images)

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Linguaculture
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 2013
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 9-24

Dates

published

2013-06-01

online

2015-04-18

Contributors

author

Ana-Maria Ştefan

• Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania

References

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Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/lincu-2015-0008