(Untitled)

[nathskywalker]

I finally started my term paper! I'm about 400 words into it which is really great considering that this baby needs to be 8,000 words long. Oh well, at least I started it. Another problem is that even as I formulate the thesis I'm seeing that what I want to do is all over the place as I want to examine fictionality and colonial myth. But I'll

Comments

[shayna611]

I'm curious now just what "fictionality and colonial myth" entails.

[nathskywalker]

Ian Watt observes that Robinson Crusoe is one of “the great myths of our civilization,” (Watt 288) alongside such characters as Don Quijote, Faust and Don Juan. But Robinson is also the one who has received the most "responses" (all those Robinsonades that are pretty much copycat stories of people on stranded islands, modern day interpretations). I'm using a postcolonial response to Robinson, J.M. Coetzee's Foe, to work on the myth and fictionality aspect. In Foe (which is a crazy metafictional novel I don't completely understand), the story is narrated by a female castaway who encounters Robinson and Friday and spends a year with them. Unlike in the original, this Robinson is not the posterboy for Protestant work ethic but just sort of sits around for 15+ years instead of constructing the great colony Defoe's Robinson constructs. And Friday's lack of an own voice in Defoe's novel is explained away by him having literally no voice as his his tongue was cut out at some point in his life

[shayna611]

I liked the long answer! It was really interesting.

[nathskywalker]

Thanks so much :D It's interesting but really hard to write about. We'll see how it turns out.