Imperial Eyes Rhetorics Of Empire Building In The Movie Robinson Crusoe

Essay from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Comparative Literature, grade: manque, Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University (Faculté des lettres), course: Anglais/ Cultural Studies/ Postcolonialism, language: English, abstract: In this paper I analyze the movie Robinson Crusoe to understand the rhetoric of empire building and to stand at instances of appropriation that push the west to cherish superiority over the “other”. I focus on the discursive strategies used by the west to inferiorize the other race and to reduce them to cruel creatures. I start by dwelling on the representation of the “other” and the landscape and I focus on the production of knowledge as a tool used to inferiroize them. At the end I stop at some paradoxes within the colonial discourse that create ruptures in the western empire. I do that by questing signs of resistance that break the discourse of empire building and that reveal the ambivalent nature of the colonial discourse. Keywords: Robinson Crusoe - Colonial Discourse - Empire Building – Orientalism - Film Studies

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Constance, language: English, abstract: “But this is not a place of words. Each syllable, as it comes out is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday.” This passage from the last page of J. M. Coetzee's novel Foe, shows a reflection on the limits of language. It solves the puzzle of the story, of why it has previously failed to tell that of Friday. Although it seems to be the centre of Susan Barton's narration, she could only assume what the core of his story is. The reason for this blank space though is explained in that very quote: As a forcefully mutilated and silenced character, whose tongue has been removed,Friday is, in the end, revealed to not be in the power to express himself with the convention of words or in linguistic terms but embodies a different form of communication. The novel Foe, written by the South African author J. M. Coetzee is a rewriting of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1719. It questions the colonial values embedded in the original and deconstructs the concept of Empire. He thus constructs a pseudobiographical fiction to Defoe himself and the original text. As part of the canon it paints a nearly idealistic picture of first colonial settlement.

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 6.0, University of Basel, language: English, abstract: King Solomon's Mines was written at a time when Victorian society was confronted with a long-term cultural shift that took place towards the fin de siècle. Women’s rights movements had emerged since the 1860’s. Their demands focused on extending their role in Victorian society and hence threatened the patriarchal establishment. In this milieu, male writers perceived these female advancements, which also took place in literature, as jeopardy of their own creative space. Many female writers were writing about social observations, and were thus considered as only writing about the unexciting and ordinary. As a reaction, efforts were made towards reclaiming the novel as a male exclusivity. This process was detectable in the foundation of literature clubs only for men, and the revival of the adventurous, exciting romance. With this came the emergence of literary characters, such as Allan Quatermain, who act as the heroic male and express their patriarchal demands. They can be seen as an attempt to preserve the social position of the male from its own fragmentation. In this paper, I want to analyze this attempted preservation of white masculinity and its conflict with the notions of race, gender and class from a post-colonial perspective. It is vital to notice that the recuperation of masculinity took place not in the home country, but in the colonies, where its regeneration was still considered possible. As a result, this notion of colonial masculinity is closely aligned with the appearance of Imperialism. For decades, the collective myth of colonialism had been nurtured by the adventurous tales that were circulating in Britain since Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. It intensified again during the Age of Imperialism and stimulated its readers to imitate the heroic protagonist. The new Imperialism presented itself as a purely male sphere of influence and its administration lay entirely in the hands of men. Its masculine representation was further boosted by the appearances of soldiers and hunters as colonial heroes and the supply for its administration was fuelled by the aforementioned crisis of masculinity taking place in later Victorian Britain. The journey to the colonies promised freedom from the restrictions of the male social roles back home, and it opened new possibilities for the development of a new type of masculinity, that of the imperial hero. Victorian Imperialism thus contained and enforced the "masculine imperative".

Explores a major eighteenth-century narrative and the power of the Crusoe figure beyond the pages of the original book.

Eyes Wide Shut is open to several interpretations, none of which fits perfectly to all parts and aspects of the film. And this is exactly what makes the movie so intriguing: its ambiguity and loose ends, which leave interpretation to the viewer.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Trier, 12 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the tale of a castaway turning his misfortune into a great enterprise, has become more than a famous novel; it has found its place among our cultural heritage. This paper will deal with certain interpretations of the novel that regard the protagonist Crusoe as a classic example of homo economicus, focus on a concept of work that is supposed to underline what is called dignity of labour and construct Crusoe’s island life as an ideal state of natural existence. All these concepts of interpretation that were applied to Defoe’s novel during time share, as conceived here, certain colonial connotations, which are also emphasised by Defoe’s concept of the native colonial subject Friday. Therefore, Defoe’s novel can still be read as a prototype of colonial fiction, mirroring the ideological concerns of the Western imagery on the ‘New World’. On attempt to deconstruct colonial fiction is the intertextual rereading of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe by the South African author J.M. Coetzee in his novel Foe. Coetzee’s work itself is here conceived as an attempt to deconstruct the colonial myth that has been implicitly or explicitly attached to the figure of Robinson Crusoe and his story. In regard to Coetzee’s reconception of the English classic the concepts that are illustrated and examined in the first part of this paper, in context of Defoe’s original, will be revised in terms of appropriation of space in colonial fiction, the figure of Crusoe and Friday and the question of the telling of colonial history.

A landmark work from the author of Orientalism that explores the long-overlooked connections between the Western imperial endeavor and the culture that both reflected and reinforced it. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the Western powers built empires that stretched from Australia to the West Indies, Western artists created masterpieces ranging from Mansfield Park to Heart of Darkness and Aida. Yet most cultural critics continue to see these phenomena as separate. Edward Said looks at these works alongside those of such writers as W. B. Yeats, Chinua Achebe, and Salman Rushdie to show how subject peoples produced their own vigorous cultures of opposition and resistance. Vast in scope and stunning in its erudition, Culture and Imperialism reopens the dialogue between literature and the life of its time.

Explores Sino-Japanese relations through encounters that took place between each country's people living at the margins of empire.