NATURE AS AN ‘OTHER’: AN ECOCRITICAL STUDY OF JOSEPH CONRAD’S 'HEART OF DARKNESS' (Pages 70-84) by Dr. Sambit Panigrahi in THE ENGLISH RESEARCH EXPRESS / ISSN:2321-1164 (Online); 2347-2642 (Print)

In today’s world of massive environmental destruction, the recently evolved critical practice of ecocriticism probes into the treatment of Nature as an ‘other’ by humanist discourses. In its attempt to unravel the causative history of this ‘otherization’ of Nature, Ecocriticism finds that the Western discursive practices, shaped by the scriptural texts like The Bible and epics like Iliad and Odyssey, have been decidedly anthropocentric or human-centered. However, the culmination of this human-centered worldview was achieved during The Enlightenment which gave the humans an autonomy over Nature as they thought that they could master Nature by understanding the laws that govern it. Famous colonial writer Joseph Conrad’s writings are replete with the instances of the ‘otherization’ of Nature where the colonial explorers, while exploring into the various colonized parts of the world, treat Nature as an ‘other.’ In this context, this article intends to show how in the colonial novels of Joseph Conrad, the colonizers make blatant exhibition of the anti-Nature principles of the Western discursive practices and see Nature as an ‘other’ to humanity. Keywords: The Enlightenment, anthropocentrism, ecocriticism, other, spatial colonization, renaissance, dualism, man-specism