先行研究を読んでいて思ったこと:自分の卒論は、15年前なら結構センセーショナルだったんだ。下線部分なんて、まさしくそのまんまなんだけれど…

In 1886, a year later, Conrad became a British subject and did finally pass his British Master Mariner’s exam, but while awarding him the long coveted Captain’s Certificate, his examiner advised him to “go into steam.” Since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, steam had become an important new technology, one that Conrad felt an aversion to and a reluctance to pursue (Jean-Aubry, Conrad, I, p. 55). The canal “pierced” the Isthmus of Suez, as Conrad was fond of phrasing it — obviously he saw it as an inflicted violence — and connected the Mediterranean and the Red Seas, to facilitate the route to India and thus strengthen that imperial connection. But steam did not accord with Conrad’s ideas of seamanship, forged as they had been by the fictions of Hugo, Marryat, and Cooper. And in the early pages of his second novel, An Outcast of the Islands, Conrad had eulogized the sea Before the time when the French mind set the Egyptian muscle in motion and produced a dismal but profitable ditch. Then a great pall of smoke sent out by countless steamboats was spread over the restless mirror of the Infinite. The hand of the engineer tore down the veil of the terrible beauty in order that greedy and faithless landlubbers might pocket dividends. The mystery was destroyed. (p. 12)

　全く意識していなかったことなんだけれども、2年前の自分はすごかった気がする。