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Conrad Within the Time-Space Continuum Con Coroneos. Space, Conrad, and Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. viii + 199 pp. $65.00
WHAT DISTINGUISHES Con Coroneos' Space, Conrad, and Modernity is panache, that incomparable blend of wit and chutzpah. Both serve him well in an ambitious undertaking whose declared subject is "the fall of space and its redemption." The first half of the book is concerned with the fall; the last half, with the redemption. Predictably the first part of the book is the more convincing. As Dante and Milton previously discovered, redemption is the harder case to make. Which is not to say that Coroneos does not present a clever and engaging (and highly readable!) argument. He does so in a format that fits the distinctly postmodern tone and emphasis of the book-in a series of brilliant intellectual riffs that soar like jazz solos, proceeding by association rather than logic, from John Buchan to Orson Welles, from seances to semiotics. In the course of these flights, Coroneos reclaims not only space but denigrated or neglected chunks of cultural history.
As the author declares in his introduction, postmodern literature and criticism assign to space the priority that modernism formerly accorded to time. In the postmodern West, to be a subject is "to speak from, to, or in." And increasingly we are compelled to recognize the role that space plays in our cultural experience-in the advent of globalized commerce, in the forays of postcolonial nationalisms, in the experiences of virtual reality and hypertext, in the information deluge of the World Wide Web. Whither is the ascent of space leading us? And what, if anything, do we gain from its prominence? Alluringly, the spatialization of thought, intensified by the reinvigorated discipline of geography, offers us the "mirage of fullness" that Bergson once observed in time. More importantly, the intellectual dominance of space allows us to see the possibility of an art that can free us from the objective world, by putting a distance between us and things. Saussurean linguistics and its allied disciplines have enabled us to focus on the opposition between words and objects. But this insistent focus on space has its drawbacks as well: it produces vertigo, increases anxiety about the lack of a center,...