Description:

Dr. Ivan Kreilkamp of Indiana University will be giving a talk entitled, “Meat, Flesh, Skin: the Carnality of The Secret Agent.” 

Abstract: This paper reads Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) in constellation with several other texts – including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), and Conrad’s own story “Falk” (1903) – in order to consider the novel’s preoccupation with cannibalism and other perversions or taboo forms of the usual human relation to food, animal flesh, and eating. A fantasy image of a nightmarish cannibal feast recurs, I’ll suggest, in several forms in Conrad’s novel, crystallizing a set of concerns regarding the integrity or wholeness of the human body, its susceptibility to reduction to meat or flesh, its vulnerability to violence, and that human body’s differentiation or non-differentiation from that of a nonhuman animal.