Un Voicing The Empire Coetzee S Re Writing Of Robinson Crusoe

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 1998 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3 (A), University of Leipzig (Institute for Anglistics), course: Postcolonial Literatures, language: English, abstract: J. M. Coetzee's 1986 novel Foe leaves its reader in a tumble of a multi-layered reality, confused about literary original and copy, and, maybe most grave, confronted with the question: what is historical truth and how can it be recognised. The veils that unfold and reveal the facets of fiction and reality through the novel are many, and they are intricately woven into each other. We, the readers, however educated and experienced with fictional texts, may find ourselves slightly confused after a first reading. Coetzee has written a parody1 of a classic of world literature: Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, first published in 17192. The simple fact that Coetzee's work of fiction was first published in 19863 makes it evident that it was based on the older classic. Yet the content of the novel claims the very opposite when the female protagonist Susan Barton tells how the story really was before Mr Foe sat down to turn it into a novel of his own intentions, altering and falsifying it. She tells her own story in the Iperspective, in terms of the 'plot' even before the writer Mr Foe would have completed his 'Robinson Crusoe'. Through this, Coetzee creates the illusion that Susan Barton's report might have indeed been the antecessor of the literary classic Robinson Crusoe. Nevertheless, we are talking of a work of fiction here, so there is no doubt that Coetzee marvellously plays with the means of storytelling instead of telling the world 'how it all really was'. There is no such Robinson Crusoe as depicted both in Defoe's and Coetzee's novel - there is merely fiction, and one should not confuse fiction and reality, however many layers of both seem to be mingled into each other in Coetzee's novel. 1 A parody according to Linda Hutcheon is an: "imitation characterised by ironic inversion", or "repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than simularity"; in: Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York and London: Methuen, 1985, p.6 2 See: Bibliographical Note; in: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe. London: Dent, 1975, p. xiii 3 First published in Great Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg 1986; here it will be referred to the Penguin paperback edition of 1987 when quoting passages from the text.

Essay aus dem Jahr 2010 im Fachbereich Didaktik - Englisch - Literatur, Werke, , Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: The story is written from the perspective of Susan, a castaway on the same island as Cruso and Friday. It’s a story of islands: Cruzo’s island, the ship, Foe’s house, England. In addition the actors are islands too: they are isolated individuals, living in their own world. The result is an almost autistic silence. In this essay, the main characters are described as islands in an archipelago, seperated characters, condemned to each other. Susan’s story, an oral story, is a central theme in the novel. It becomes gradually clear that she is telling her story to the author Foe. Susan fails in her attempt to produce her story in a book. Friday is the footprint of Robinson Crusoe and every Robinsonade. Coetzee foregrounds Friday’s silence. By doing so, he undermines the hegemony of the colonial discourse that presupposes European racial superiority. Friday (black) and Susan (woman) are both colonised subjects by the male colonizing characters, (both male and white): Cruso on his island and Foe, whose trade is in books, not in truth.

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.

When Susan Barton is marooned on an island in the middle of the Atlantic she enters the world of two men. One is a mute negro called Friday; the other is Robinson Cruso. The Island is a society already at work. Its rules are simple: survival, industry and order. Cruso is master and Friday is the slave. Susan watches the creation of a barren world - an architecture of stone terraces above bleak and empty beaches - and waits to be rescued. Back in London, with Friday in tow as evidence of her strange adventure, she approaches the author Daniel Foe. But Foe is less interested in the history of the island than in the story if Susan herself, and battle lines are drawn between writer and subject. Sole witness to this contest, as he was to the mystery of Cruso's island, is the silent Friday.

With the same electrical intensity of language and insight that he brought to Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee reinvents the story of Robinson Crusoe—and in so doing, directs our attention to the seduction and tyranny of storytelling itself. J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. In 1720 the eminent man of letters Daniel Foe is approached by Susan Barton, lately a castaway on a desert island. She wants him to tell her story, and that of the enigmatic man who has become her rescuer, companion, master and sometimes lover: Cruso. Cruso is dead, and his manservant, Friday, is incapable of speech. As she tries to relate the truth about him, the ambitious Barton cannot help turning Cruso into her invention. For as narrated by Foe—as by Coetzee himself—the stories we thought we knew acquire depths that are at once treacherous, elegant, and unexpectedly moving.

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