When Literature Turns into History: Heart of Darkness (1902) by Joseph Conrad and Avatar (2009) by James Cameron
When Literature Turns into History: Heart of Darkness (1902) by Joseph Conrad and Avatar (2009) by James Cameron

Summary/Abstract: More than one century after the publication of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s conceptualization of the world and representation of both the Whiteman and the African black characters still have an impact on the representation of the Other whether African or non African. This article examines the legacy of Conrad’s novel through James Cameron’s Avatar produced by 20th Century Fox and released in 2009. It mainly refers to Roland Barthes’s view of connotation and denotation and art, in this case image and cinema, as a means to transit meaning. His framework is developed in Mythologies (1972), Image-Music-Text (1977) and Elements of Semiology (1986). The analysis relies on specific selected citations from Conrad’s novel and their equivalent visual quotations from Cameron’s media text focusing on four signs. I study Avatar as a text that reproduces Conrad’s novel, which certifies the internal and external impact of expressions such as “the interminable waterway” and “the European genius” on twenty-first century cinema. Conrad’s masterpiece still draws the faces of the non-Western that Hollywood unconsciously reproduces.

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