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Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on November 17, 2007
Literary Imagination 2008 10(1):53-61; doi:10.1093/litimag/imm121
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Kurtz's Night Table

Janet Gezari*

*E-mail: jkgez@conncoll.edu

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The question posed by one contributor to the recent MLA volume, Approaches to Teaching "Heart of Darkness" and "The Secret Sharer"—"Why should and how can one teach a novella that is considered racist?"—anticipates one a student asked me this spring: "Why are we reading Heart of Darkness if it's racist?"1 To be sure, the questions are not exactly the same. The English professor's question is more cautious than my student's. By asserting that Heart of Darkness is "considered racist," she either begs the question of the novella's imputed racism or shifts its ground from judgment to a simple acknowledgement of how Heart of Darkness has been read and felt, especially by postcolonial readers and, increasingly, by students who have studied postcolonial literature and theory. Chinua Achebe was the first to propose that we remove Heart of Darkness from the curriculum. That was 1975. Last . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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