Crusoe in the Cave: Defoe and the Semiotics of Desire (original) (raw)
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Emotional Management of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe's Main Character
Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 2023
This study aims to describe and reveal the main character's emotional management in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, a Penguin classics novel published in London in 1994. This study employs a descriptive qualitative technique and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic approach. The research data was derived from the novel's narrations and portrayal of the main character. The study found that the main character's psychology employed a defensive mechanism to regulate all the emotions that arose. The main character in this work uses suppression, rationalization, reaction construction, regression, anger and indifference, and imagination. Repression serves as the main character's protection mechanism in the narrative. The main character demonstrated that he attempted to channel his melancholy into thankfulness and to turn his anxiety into rational thinking.
Instinct of the Main Character in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE & LITERATURE
Human behavior is born of a will that is driven by instinct. Instinct appears as a characteristic possessed by a creature. This research analyzes the instinct of the main character. In analyzing this research, the researcher used psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud. Instinct divides into two life instinct (Eros) and death instinct (Thanatos). The main character in this research is by Daniel Defoe"s novel Robinson Crusoe. The objective of this research is to describe the instincts of the main character in the novel use psychoanalysis. The result of this research was instinct of the main character divided into two, life instinct (Eros) and death instinct (Thanatos). Life instinct appears from pleasure principle and natural desire. Life instinct of the main character appears because of the desire for freedom, pleasure and also curiosity to voyage. Then, it appears due to the natural desire of human to meet their food and drink needs followed by, death instinct which appears because of the life defense of the main character. Death instinct of the main character arise because of the defense of someone"s life when he is threatened by danger and also because of his solitude that lives alone in a foreign island.
International Journal of English and Studies, 2021
Although New-Historicism and Reader-response literary theories suggest different attempts in the generation of meaning, in fact, they exist in separate domains. However, the connection between them is a matter of the existence of a text. Without doubt, on the most basic and cursory level, New Historicism is aimed at decoding the manner and culture prevalent in a particular time of history as encoded in the text while Reader-response firmly comes from the strength that a work of art cannot generate meaning for itself without the reader. From this measure of understanding, the clarity in the amalgamation possibility becomes clear. In Robinson Crusoe (1719) analysis here, the intention is to identify the meaning of realism construction the researcher gives to it but within the historical context of the 18th century English novel. On this significant scope the twin theories of New-Historicism and Reader-response become unavoidable tools in the research investigation.
Modern Philology, 2016
This volume brings together eleven essays on Robinson Crusoe published by Maximillian E. Novak in journals and colloquia between 1996 and 2012. Each essay explores a different way of raising the vexed question of the nature of Defoe's "realism"-the distinguishing quality of his fiction that many readers have experienced, but few can convincingly define. In an introductory essay that provides a retrospective of his career, Novak recalls his arrival at Oxford in the mid-1950s to begin his graduate studies. He was drawn to work on Defoe in two ways: he wanted to understand "Defoe's world and the ways in which he saw the problems of his time" and also "the methods by which Defoe succeeded in creating a sense of the real" (2). The first of these interests led to Novak's groundbreaking works of historical criticism, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (1962) and Defoe and the Nature of Man (1963); the second led to Realism, Myth and History in Defoe's Fiction (1983) and to the essays in the volume under review. For Novak, each of these questions is answered in terms of the other: that is, what is real about Defoe's fiction is that it is set firmly in a historical context, while the historicity is subordinated to an enlivening personal consciousness. Defoe's fictional histories use "a variety of devices for evoking the real through awakening the imagination of the reader, asking him/her to see what was not fully in the text" (5). It is the variety of Defoe's devices for stimulating the reader's imagination that Novak explores through these essays. One device that Defoe adapted from the visual arts is the representation of ordinary objects and persons in paintings. In an early essay on the novel, Sir Walter Scott noted the influence on Defoe of the Dutch and Flemish realist painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who represented
Fears, Apprehensions and Conjectures: Suspense in Robinson Crusoe
English Literature, 2017
The importance of Robinson Crusoe in the origins of the novel depends not only on its progressive plot and empirical style, but also on its pioneering narrative devices. Defoe's work is characterised, in particular, by a new approach to the creation of suspense, considered by narratologists as one of the universals of narrative. This approach is based on a consistent, highly diversified use of hypothetical thinking. Crusoe's emotionally charged previsions have the function of presenting possible plot developments, staging, and causing, the oscillation between fear and hope that is characteristic of suspense. Defoe's work with suspense shows that epistemological change, in particular the rise of the modern notion of probability, had relevant implications also at the level of narrative discourse.
His-Story and Her-Story: A Comparative Study of Robinson Crusoe and Foe
Journal of foreign languages, 2020
History is often said to be his-story owing to it being exclusively written by men about men. It consists of heroic as well as tragic tales of men, heroic and tragic both terms being exploited by Aristotle in the context of men again. Literature of any nation or language is also History per se as it reflects the ethos of the time in which it is created, and can also be called His-story because of dominant presence of male voices on the literary horizon for centuries. It is only after the surge of movements and theories like Feminism and Postcolonialism, that Her-story started to surface up in literary works. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (first published in 1719) and Foe by J. M. Coetzee (rewriting of Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1986) are the two works showcasing this transition in focus from His-story to Her-story. Whereas one tells the story of a male castaway Robinson Crusoe who turns out to be a powerful, colonial patriarch, completely avoiding the existence of woman; the other tells the story of Susan Barton, a female castaway introduced by Coetzee into the world of Crusoe (Cruso here). Coetzee has not altogether done away, however, with the centuries long suppression of female voice as he introduces the fictional character of Foe (modelled on the writer Daniel Defoe) whom Susan wants to pen the story of her stay on "Cruso"s island". Novel for a major part revolves around Susan"s efforts to get her story written and published the way she wants it to, with Foe insisting on giving it a new direction and plot disregarding Susan"s concern for the story of Friday (Cruso"s black manservant on the island whom Susan brings with her to the mainland, Cruso having died on the ship). Susan wants to tell the (hi)story of Friday"s silencing (his tongue having cut off) and thus make a place for herself in the history, but for Foe, the story is not attractive enough as the truth is too boring to be told nakedly. This paper, thus attempts a comparative analysis of both the works, focusing on how difficult it is to get Her-story told without it being influenced by his-story or his opinions, thereby drawing our attention to the fact that no voice or no story is entirely original and thus reliable.
The Crusoe Trilogy and the Critics During the last two decades, feminist, Marxist, and New Historicist critics have transformed our understanding of the eighteenth-century novel, but none of them has questioned the iconic status of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Even those critics skeptical of the hero's justifications for colonizing ''his'' island accept the commonplace that Defoe's first novel transmutes the raw material of Puritanical injunction and moral self-scrutiny into the psychological realism that helps define the novel form. In turn, Crusoe's individualistic psychology, most critics agree, marks the transition from a residual aristocratic to an emergent bourgeois, capitalist, and (since the 1980s) broadly Foucauldian ideology of selfhood. The titles of many of these critics' works-centering on ''rises'' and ''origins''-reveal a tendency to write the history of modern identity, the rise of the novel, and the rise of financial capitalism in mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing terms. 1 Paradoxically, Robinson Crusoe retains its crucial role in revisionist histories of the novel precisely because Defoe can be credited with (or blamed for) developing a colonialist model of subjectivity: conquering the wilderness and exploiting the labor of native peoples allow the colonizer the luxury of becoming a bourgeois subject. 2 Seen in this light, Crusoe's economic moralizing and religious proselytizing may not quite open a window to the soul, but they do offer a compelling novelistic strategy for representing the psychological complexities of Defoe's reluctant pilgrim. This consensus view of Robinson Crusoe, however, holds up only if critics ignore or explain away the two sequels that Defoe published shortly after his successful first novel. In this essay, I call into question some of the assumptions and values that