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A África e os africanos em Heart of Darkness (Coração das Trevas) Roberto Carlos de ASSIS ABSTRACT: Heart of Darkness (1902), by Joseph Conrad, has been approached from diverse perspectives within literary studies, be them reader response, formalism or cultural studies approaches to mention but a few. In 1975, for example, Chinua Achebe argued that Joseph Conrad projected Africa as the other world, opposite to Europe, presenting Africa and the Africans just as an assembly of limbs. To add to the discussion, within the scope of CORDIALL – Corpus of Discourse for the Analysis of Language and Literature, in this paper, we investigate Conrad's text from a systemic functional linguistics perspective. Based on the transitivity system (HALLIDAY 1994) and the system network for the representation of social actors (van LEEUWEN, 1996,) we investigated Africa and Africans' representation in Conrad's novellete. Wordlist and Concordance lines of the WordSmith® software were used to handle the corpus. In addition to corroborating Achebe's argument, the analysis of transitivity revealed that Congolese people are represented as circumstances or as participants in processes that do not affect other participants. Moreover, the representation of social actors pointed to exclusion, backgrounding and fragmentation of African people as social actors in the development of the story.
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