Over the course of the last two decades the name of Joseph Conrad has incongruously become, at least within the academy, synonymous with racism, imperialism, and the patriarchy. Conrad’s political star began to wane when Chinua Achebe, in a now famous essay of 1975, called Conrad “a thoroughgoing racist,” claimed that Heart of Darkness “celebrates” the dehumanization of African people, and attacked Conrad as a “purveyor of comforting myths”—comforting, that is, to Europeans. This theme has been picked up by other eminent intellectual opinion-makers: in his recent book Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said (though an admirer of the writer) regretted Conrad’s inability to “grant the natives their freedom” or even to imagine that “Africa or South America could ever have had an independent history or culture.” Feminist scholar Nina Pelikan Straus has charged Conrad with “complicity in the racist, sexist, imperialist . . . world he has inhabited with Kurtz.”

And so it goes. As a result Conrad, or at any rate Heart of Darkness, his best known novel and the one which has traditionally been taught in literature survey courses, has by now become a hot potato few professors enjoy tossing about with students primed to interpret every text in light of the contemporary political issues of race, class, and gender. In Great Books,¹ his account of the Lit-Hum course at Columbia University, David Denby describes the class spent on Heart of Darknessas the most explosive unit of the entire year, bringing previously hidden