| Product: |
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe |
| Date: |
08.06.01 (308 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: classic - the sort of thing you need to have read.
Disadvantages: very tedious in places., very un pc.
In recent times, this classic children's text has been reconsidered in some surprising ways.
I first read Robinson Crusoe when I was about ten (Understanding not all of it.)and re read it several years ago as part of my English literature degree. From my childhood, I remember a fairly harmles story about a bloks stuck on an island rearing goats, growing corn and trying to make pots. Oh, and there was man Friday.
These days, Robinson Crusoe is regarded by academics as being a book about colonialism. After all, we have one English man becoming King of an island (which is clearly home to some other people.) Crusoe's treatment of Man Friday is troubling to a modern audience (or perhaps should be at any rate.) Firstly, it is clear that Friday (so named by Crusoe)must learn English - Crusoe makes no effort to discover any language Friday might have. Friday is instructed to call Crusoe master and treated much like a slave. These men are both outcasts on an island. They have idfferent languages and cultures, differnt skin colours. Both Crusoe and the text assume that the white man is the superior.
It s also a story that really speaking has no women in it. More of that in a moment.
Robinson Crusoe has attracted revisionary writing - for anyone who has not encountered this, it is a new genre in which modern writers retell old stories from a different perspective in order to cast new light on them. If you would like to challenge your ideas about Robinson Crusoe, I would recomend reading "Foe" by J.M. Cotzee (spelling uncertain)This is the tale of a woman who is cast up on a barren island where she finds a white man planting rocks and a black man who has had his tongue cot out. When the woman escapes from the island, she sells her tale to one Mr Foe - a book writer. WE know that there is no owman in Robinson crusoe, and this book suggests that the woman has been deliberatly cut out. It is a curious and disturbing read - wel
l worth the effort though. Definatley something to follow up on Robinson Crusoe with. It's also about a tenth of the size!
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