Critics who allege that Conrad is imperialistic may themselves be practising ideological and temporal imperialism. They assail the text for failing to endorse their own present-day beliefs or prejudices; and thereby they seek to subordinate the literary work to their own systems. ... A literary work may have a diversity of political implications and consequences, but it is not a political manifesto. It is an imaginative work which offers a voluntary and hypothetical experience. ... Awareness of the tentacular complexity of 'Heart of Darkness' may alert to us a current critical tendency: the reductive treatment of past texts in the attempt to vindicate the political gestures of the present ... Naturally readers discuss political aspects of literary texts; but to use political criteria as a 'master-discourse', as the final tribunal of judgement, is to commit an error of categorization. (An equivalent error would be to condemn The Communist Manifesto for lacking the lyricism of Shelley's 'Ode to a Skylark'.)
YES.
An excellently phrased response to the critical literary theories (feminism, post-colonialism, post-modernism) seeking to pigeonhole literature into their own narrow agendas instead of actually reading the text.
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