SOURCE: "The Novel as Scientific Discourse: The Example of Conrad," in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 21, Nos. 2 & 3, Winter-Spring, 1988, pp. 220-27.

In the following essay, Levine considers Joseph Conrad's fiction as a form of scientific discourse that subverts Victorian realism and Darwinian gradualism.

The word "discourse" in its traditional meaning implies rationality, thematic coherence, and sustained argument; it also obviously carries the suggestion of non-fiction. Discourses are about something (presumably). In modern theory, "discourse" implies something else again. With Foucault it implies a cultural and political context so that when, in a characteristic contemporary move of intellectual imperialism, we want to argue that science is only another form of discourse, we mean to be diminishing, or challenging its truth claims, and implicating it in the ideologies it has, by defining itself, excluded. Like other kinds of discourse, the argument implies, science is not exempt from epistemological limitations; it...