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‘He was one of us’: Rortyian liberal ethnocentrism and ironic narrative voice in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim

ABSTRACT This essay puts Joseph Conrad’s turn-of-the-century novel Lord Jim (1900) in imaginative conversation with the work of the contemporary American liberal philosopher, Richard Rorty; it also makes a new case for considering Lord Jim in close relation to Conrad’s later political novels, Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911). At first glance, Rorty and Conrad, who hardly share the same political worldview, appear to have little in common other than their mutual predilection for irony. Yet on closer inspection Lord Jim contains a profound critique of Rorty’s liberal ethnocentrism, which is rooted paradoxically not in differences but affinities between the moral attitudes of the two writers. What emerges from this comparison is a literary criticism actively engaged in the theorisation of political philosophy: a criticism in which the seemingly improbable pairing of Conrad and Rorty comes to shed new light on both.