Competing models of socially constructed economic man : differentiating Defoe's Crusoe from the Robinson of neoclassical economics

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe has seldom been read as an explicitly political text. When it has, it appears that the central character was designed to warn the early eighteenth-century reader against political challenges to the existing economic order. Insofar as Defoe’s Crusoe stands for "economic man", he is a reflection of historically-produced assumptions about the need for social conformity, not the embodiment of any genuinely essential economic characteristics. This insight is used to compare Defoe’s conception of economic man with that of the neoclassical Robinson Crusoe economy. On the most important of the ostensibly generic principles espoused by neoclassical theorists, their "Robinson" has no parallels with Defoe’s Crusoe. Despite the shared name, two quite distinct social constructions serve two equally distinct pedagogical purposes. Defoe’s Crusoe extols the virtues of passive middle-class sobriety for effective social organisation; the neoclassical Robinson champions the establishment of markets for the sake of productive efficiency

Landscape, culture, and education in Defoe's Robinson crusoe

In their article "Landscape, Culture, and Education in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe" Geert Vandermeersche and Ronald Soetaert discuss Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as a narrative that translates nature and our dealings with it into a literary text. Vandeermeersche and Soetaert postulate that the novel can be read as a quintessential fable of humans' cultivation of nature and the creation of individuality, which, at the same time, provides its readers with strategies for describing processes such as education. Robinson Crusoe and its characters, metaphors, and scenarios function in the "auto-communication" of culture as an enduring equipment for living (Burke), a company readers keep (Booth), and a cognitive tool in modern Western culture

Anti-Crusoes, Alternative Crusoes: Revisions of the Island Story in the Twentieth Century

In lieu of an abstract, here are the chapter\u27s first two paragraphs: Everyone thinks they know the plot of Robinson Crusoe. The story of the man who is shipwrecked on an island alone is ubiquitous and feels deeply familiar, even for those who have not read it. Robinson Crusoe has been plagiarized, cannibalized, and serialized almost since the moment it hit the streets of London in 1719. Here is a passage from an Argentinean novel by Victoria Slavuski published in 1993 that captures the sense of familiarity and also the distance twentieth-century readers have in their relationship to Robinson Crusoe: “On days like these we promised each other that at long last we would take the time to read the copy of Robinson (Crusoe) that each household kept alongside the Bible and Twenty-five Ways to Prepare Lobster, written on Juan Fernandez by Amelita Riera. Nobody got past page fifteen of Robinson and almost nobody opened the Bible.”1 Literary critics often treat the multitude of twentieth-century versions of Crusoe as antagonistic to Defoe’s character. They tend to consider contemporary novels or films or poems as entities in competition with Robinson Crusoe’s fictional world. However, these modern renderings are never so neatly drawn. More often than not, writers use these alternative Crusoes to forge lines of affiliation and empathy, between the eighteenth century and our own time as well as between different regions and languages. Argentinean, Caribbean, and African Crusoes are in conversation with one another as much as they are in dialogue with the historic Defoe. Writers around the globe adapt and transform Crusoe and Defoe’s novel to establish a literary web of connection that has come to define our own global moment where fiction travels beyond national and linguistic borders. In this chapter I will move through a few observations on nineteenth-century Crusoes before delving into the twentieth-century map of literary islands crisscrossing the globe

Analyzing “Other” Construction in Robinson Crusoe from Post Colonialism Perspective

This paper uses the theory of post-colonialism to do research on “Robinson Crusoe”, taking the geographical environment (the desert island) and nation (Friday and Robinson) as examples, analyzes the construction of the other. And the characters analyzing reflects colonialism, which leads people to ponder. This paper is divided into four parts. The first part is introduction, in the first part, the author mainly introduces the background of “Robinson Crusoe”, the relevant post-colonialism theory, the theory of “others” proposed by Zhu Yuande (2007), as well as the current situation and purpose of the research. The second part is to analyze the two protagonists, Robinson and Friday, which reflects colonialism thought. The third part analyzes the construction of the other in “Robinson Crusoe” from two aspects: they are the geographical environment and the nation. The last part is conclusion

STRUGGLE FOR LIFE OF ROBINSON CRUSOE IN GEORGE MILLER AND RODNEY K. HARDY’S ROBINSON CRUSOE (1997): AN INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH

The problem of this study is to reveal how the struggle of life in major character is. The objectives of the study are to analyze the major character in Robinson Crusoe movie based on Individual Psychological Approach. The study is a literary study, which can be categorized into a descriptive qualitative study. The object of this study is Robinson Crusoe movie. The data sources are primary and secondary data sources. The primary data source is the movie Robinson Crusoe script and the secondary data are related to the primary data that support the analysis such as some books of psychology and website related to the research. The method used for collecting data is library research and documentation. The technique of data analysis is descriptive analysis. Based on the analysis, the writer concludes that the problem faced by the major character is struggle to go out of his condition, it causes the writer to use individual psychological perspective such as: Inferiority Feeling, Striving for Superiority, Fictional Finalism, Style of Life, Social Interest, Creative Power. By using this method, it is known how Robinson Crusoe as the major character can solve his problem

Robinson Crusoe: literature and religion

The essay discusses Daniel Defoe´s novel Robinson Crusoe , in relationship to the way that the it reflects some of the more important ideas of the eighteenth century English thoughts which provided the climate for the issues it raises. It will examine the historical context of the novel, and discuss the philosophical ideas which had gained so much appeal to men in this new “age of enlightment” and its focus on the nature of man. In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe takes the opportunity to explore the relatioship between “natural man” and man as he is shaped by civilization.En Robinson Crusoe, de Daniel Defoe, se presenta algunas ideas básicas concernientes a la obra que son primordiales en el pensa- miento inglés del siglo XVIII. Estas ideas son el pilar del clima de los temas tratados en la novela. Se examina el contexto histó- rico y las ideas filosóficas que adquirieron tanta importancia en el hombre de esta “edad del iluminismo”. En Robinson Crusoe, Defoe se da la oportunidad de explorar la relación entre el “hombre natural” y el hombre, tal como lo moldeaba la civilización de aquella época

Ceramic Contemporaries 3: The Robinson Crusoe Tour

Ceramic Contemporaries 3: The Robinson Crusoe Tou

Construction and Deconstruction of Imagined Community—A Comparative Study of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe in Light of Nationalism

This paper makes a comparative study of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe in light of nationalism. Robinson Crusoe and Foe have been studied comparatively from the perspective of post-colonialism and postmodernism. But they haven’t been studied in light of nationalism. This paper argues that Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe contributed to form the nation of England as an imagined community, shaped “Englishness” and Euro-centrism, but J. M. Coetzee’s Foe deconstructed “Englishness” and Euro-centrism, aroused the national imagination of the Africans by rewriting it, so as to expose the fact that Euro-centrism was constructed by language, indict the Dutch and English colonial administration in South Africa and its profound and lasting hurt: the deprivation of the rights of speech, the destruction of their culture, and encourage the Africans to eliminate cultural inferiority and discrimination by creating new voice