A landmark collection of Ian Watt's essays on Joseph Conrad.

This collection of twelve original essays by established and emerging scholars, seeks to explore these landscapes in Conrad’s work and serves as a look into our own recent history at a pivotal time us as we come to realize how our actions, choices and even our mere presence directly impacts the natural world that delicately sustains us. The text engages with work by Joseph Conrad, storied British merchant marine and official British citizen as of 1886.

"Writings is the first collection to widely survey this singular polymath’s prolific activity as a writer. Edited by artists Constance DeJong and Andrew Lampert, the book spans the years 1961 – 2012 and includes fifty-seven pieces: essays originally published in small press magazines, exhibition catalogs, anthologies, and album liner notes, along with other previously unpublished texts. Conrad writes about his own work, with substantial contributions on The Flicker, Loose Connection, Four Violins, Articulation of Boolean Algebra for Film Opticals, Early Minimalism, Yellow Movies, Slapping Pythagoras, and Music and the Mind of the World, as well as that of his peers: Tony Oursler, Jack Smith, Rhys Chatham, and Henry Flynt, among others. He devotes critical essays both to grand subjects—horology, neurolinguistics, and the historical development of Western music—and more quotidian topics, such as television advertising and camouflage. He also writes on media activism, network communications, censorship, and the political and cultural implications of corporate and global media. No matter the topic or theme, Conrad always approaches his subjects with erudition, precision, and a healthy twist of humor. -- Tony Conrad (1940–2016) was a multidisciplinary artist known for his groundbreaking art, music, films, and videos, although his work doesn’t fit comfortably within any of these disciplines. He eschewed categorization and actively sought to challenge the constraints of media forms, their modes of production, and the relationships of power embedded within them"--Publisher's website.

A multidisciplinary and international collection of essays, this volume contains contributions by writers from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden, and South Africa. They employ a variety of methodological approaches, from detailed archival schoarship to theoretical perspectives on textuality and discursivity. Topics include the development of narrative voice in "Heart of Darkness"; the relationship between fictionality and missionary discourse; the notion of race in Conrad's work; and "Heart of Darkness" in contemporary classroom practice in European and South African contexts.

“Nothing short of a masterpiece. . . . One of the great critical works produced since the 1950s.”—New York Times

New Iberia was founded by a handful of Spaniards in the spring of 1779. In the more than two hundred years that have elapsed since that event, the town, now city, has experienced a rich and stimulating history. The present volume seeks to relate many of the episodes that have occurred along New Iberia's historical path to the present. Presented in twenty-seven essays, the work focuses on the people who have fashioned the town. Here, in detail, are found the stories of the early Spanish settlers, the French Creoles and their Cajun neighbors, the Anglo-Americans and the Afro-Americans, all of whom have sought their fortunes on the third bend of Bayou Teche. Here are the stories of the pioneers, of antebellum lifestyles, of freedom, of the men and women of Reconstruction who struggled to rebuild a shattered world or start one anew. Here, too, are accounts of a South Louisiana town in the Gilded Age, the World War I era, the twenties and thirties. Here are the stories of some of the men and women who played a part in the development of New Iberia. The essays, the result of research and reminiscences, recount subjects as varied as land grants and libraries, steamboats and railroads, education and entertainment, yellow fever and flood, disaster and triumph.