Critical Race Theory In Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness

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Literary theory gives people the opportunity to look at texts from different perspectives. It’s a tool that deepens personal understanding of texts. “Literary theory is the set of concepts and intellectual assumptions on which rests the work of interpreting literary texts.” (Brenton, Vice) It gives people the opportunity to look at texts from different perspectives. We all comprehend texts, art, etc. and literary theory helps us to understand literature a little better than we did before. You might read something and find a lot of details that you missed when you didn’t have literary theory to help you. For example, you can read something and feel like you have a complete and total understanding of everything you read and be wrong. Not to …show more content…

Seeing that this text shows how people react to and act towards people that are different from them this theory would be really good to use as a way to interpret this text. Critical race theory wants to challenge dominant contemporary understandings of race and the law, as well as other aspects of social structural inequalities and that is sort of what Kurtz was doing in “Heart of Darkness”. He took the side of the natives and when the company came for him he spoke out about it. The looked at him as if he were crazy and even talked about killing him, but he didn’t care, he knew what they were doing was wrong, just as Marlow did when he agreed with Kurtz and sided with the natives as well. (Bracey II, Glenn …show more content…

Tenets of this theory that can be acted upon in interpreting text are questioning the system of values that support imperialism, questioning how imperialist colonizing powers are expanding, and focusing on victims of racism, military expansion, and exploitation. (Bertens, Hans) The text “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad was placed back in colonial times. The text is about a man who learns the truth about colonization and what the colonizing powers were really up to. A man named Marlow goes on a journey from England to Africa to find another man named Kurt, whom the colonizing powers (also known as the company) assume is being held captive by the natives and/or probably dead. Marlow discovers that the company did not actually send him and the ship’s crew out there to look for Kurt, but to steal ivory. When he finally reaches Kurt he soon discovers that Kurt has sided with the natives and the more Marlow learns about the company, the more he agrees with Kurt. (Conrad,

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