• English & American cultural studies
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.221-237
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• 2009

This paper analyzes the time-shift technique in Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim. Conrad's manipulation of time in this novel is based on his aspiration for how 'to make you see,' which he believes is completed through the harmony form and substance in his works. So Conrad applies this technique which was used earlier by some writers such as Laurence Sterne to his Lord Jim to show its theme more effectively. In Lord Jim, the story consists of two parts; first, Jim jumps from a ship called the Patna and is deprived of his navigation certificate. Secondly, he wins the people's respect in Patusan in which his past related to the Patna remains hidden, but he faces his death by taking responsibility for the death of the chief's son in the island. These events in Lord Jim are not described in chronological order; that is, some events are depicted with the time-shift technique using flashback, association, or fragmentary memory to accelerate the speed of stories as well as to offer the actuality of the events. With this structure, the themes of Jim's story have something to do with his heroic actions and failures. Jim wants to be a hero and after failures he struggles to redeem himself only to fail. In particular, Jim's jump from the Patna is emphasized through the time-shift and it shows there is something incomprehensible in his action. Therefore, Conrad reveals in Lord Jim that Jim is one of us who not only are imperfect but also have the weaknesses inside that can unexpectedly emerge in an instant.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.115-170
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• 2018

The objective of this paper is to explore Jim's itinerary journey in terms of both Girald's concept of triangular desire and Derrida's concept of event. According to the Girard's mimetic desire theory, human being's desire is not spontaneous like Romanticism thought, but mimetic to the mediator between the subject and the object. Thus there is no romantic desire understood as one's own desire except mimetic desire. In this regard, mimetic desire is compatible with the conception of Derrida's thinking of an event that is resistant to its absolute singularity. Because both mimetic desire and event cannot be defined by the fact of each spatio-temporal specificity, they can not be understood by a traditional metaphysics of presence. In this paper, by using Girard's concept of mimetic desire theory, I showcase why the tragic journey of Jim's telos as a mythic quest for his romantic ego(ipse) cannot help but face his death and by using deconstructive thinking of iterability, this paper analyzes why Jim's romantic ego imitated by the mimetic desire through a mediator cannot be encountered happily with his ipseity until his end. As a victim of triangluar desire, Jim's romantic ego is nothing but a notion of an ipsiety that has been defined in terms of presence central to metaphysics. This paper also makes an attempt to re-interpret some articles contaminated with post-colonial perspectives from Derridean views with deconstructive rigorous reading to those papers to uncover an essential ground of presence.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.6
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• pp.1151-1171
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• 2011

Conrad's novels, specifically the Lingard Trilogy-Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and The Rescue-and Lord Jim, set in the Southeast Asian or Malay Archipelago can be considered travel literature that played a significant role in British imperial expansion. Conrad's Malay novels were based not only on his experience in the region during his commercial journey but also on information from earlier travel writings about the Malays and their customs, including James Brooke's journals. The English traders in Conrad's novels, namely Lingard and Jim, were partly modeled on Brooke, the White Rajah, who founded and ruled the English colony on the northwest of Borneo in the 1840s. The white traders in Conrad's novels, who act as enlightened rulers, represent the British commercial expansionism, which was obscured by the phenomenon of the civilizing mission in the late nineteenth century. On the other hand, the colonial official Clifford's tales and novels about British Malaya demonstrate the typical travel accounts of the late nineteenth century that stress the civilizing mission over commercial exploitation. The concept of the enlightening mission was rooted in evolutionary anthropological thinking, which developed as part of the natural history in the early nineteenth century. In fact, the development of natural history, stimulating British expansion in search of commercially exploitable resources and lands, enabled travel writing as the collection of natural knowledge to become a profitable business. In Conrad, the white characters are mainly traders acting as colonial rulers, while in Clifford, they are scientific rulers with their commercial interests rarely apparent. In sum, Conrad's novels reveal that the new imperialism of the civilizing mission is still a commercial one, which disturbs rather than contributes to the imperial expansion-in contrast to other travel literature such as Clifford's.