دانلود کتاب کنراد و هستی جهان – خواندنی در متافیزیک نظری

On 14 January 1913, Joseph Conrad wrote this to Jean Masbrenier, the editor of the magazine Le Divan: Here, no one has written anything about me that is worth bothering to read. But yes, a very intelligent young man has recently written an article that is a fairly successful analytical essay. I shall send you a typescript of it because I cannot find the issue of the slim and obscure review where it appeared.1 At this point Conrad had only known the “very intelligent young man” for a matter of weeks, but already the nucleus of a symbiotic relationship was beginning to form between them, though they were separated by a generation; the young man in question—Richard Curle—would go on to become Conrad’s friend, confidante, acolyte and literary populariser until the last day of the writer’s life. The article which had attracted Conrad’s attention—subsequently dismissed as superficial and naïve by critics2— appeared in Rhythm, a modernist arts journal which punched impressively above its weight during the two short years of its existence, featuring stories and poetry by Katherine Mansfield and D H Lawrence, as well as showcasing artwork by Henri Manguin and Margaret Thompson. Yet Conrad’s enthusiasm for Curle’s piece, albeit tempered (“a fairly successful analytical essay”), is puzzling; amongst its expressions of admiration, Curle—who clearly at the time of writing did not understand the architecture of Nostromo and the novella “Heart of Darkness”— criticised both works for weak construction and their perceived lack of consideration for the reader. These were not observations calculated to best please the author, so in the face of them we can only conclude that Conrad saw something else in the article that powerfully transcended their effect; enough indeed to make him not only write as he did to Masbrenier, but also to want to meet its author. We should ask what this might be.