Epic hyperbole in Homer

The Raft of Odysseus. The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer's Odyssey

An accident as old as humanity, shipwreck involves a wide range of metaphors that fuse familiarity and exoticism, allegory and specificity, providence and godless catastrophe. In exploring Cervantes’s approach to this topos, this study identifies how the metaphor conveys an incisive political commentary in Don Quixote, a literary and spiritual reflection in Persiles, and a troubling self-projection in Journey to Parnassus. Unveiling the continuities of Cervantes’s use of this motif provides intriguing insights into the experiential fractures and literary exploits of the author as he embarked on the difficult journeys of his last works and years (1614–1616).

Shipwrecked Na(rra)tion in Cervantes

This chapter analyses cartoons from The New Yorker magazine (1957) and the sitcom Gilligan’s Island (1964–1967). These comedic texts present ambivalent desert islands and ambiguous attitudes to liquid modernity. In the cartoons, humour is located in an understanding of identity as communal, which is incongruous on an uninhabited island. However, satirising solid modern behaviours in the ‘remote’ space of the desert island effectively endorses them in their ‘appropriate’ location of urban society. This ideological position is complicated by the cartoons’ representation of eroticism. Gilligan’s Island represents a spatially destabilised desert island that posits and then undermines a sense of coherent identity. A solid modern preoccupation with community is the structuring impulse of individual selfhood but is compromised by gestures towards underdetermined identity.

Community on the Desert Island: The New Yorker Cartoons and Gilligan’s Island

This essay applies space syntax theory to an analysis of the habitation built by Robinson Crusoe on his island. In so doing, it aims to provide a new perspective on the near-universal critical view that Crusoe’s stay on the island, and within it his construction of a built environment, forms part of a linear, monologic recapitulation of Western civilisation.

The essay adopts the dual approach of space syntax. First, Crusoe’s habitation is objectively analysed as a configuration that co-constitutes socio-cultural patterns of meaning and motion, considering its levels of integration, segregation and intelligibility. This section exposes fundamental problems with the critical views outlined above, for two reasons. First, because it reveals that spaces are in constant flux, simultaneously producing and being produced by socio-cultural conditions. Second, because the same configuration can be read syntactically in a number of ways depending on starting point.

My second section considers the language in which Crusoe’s habitation is expressed as reflective of the phenomenology of these spaces as the lived imaginative/emotional experiences of Defoe’s character. It is argued that within the meanings made syntactically possible, the choice and experience of meanings is less to do with Crusoe’s cultural/civilizational progression than with Defoe’s rendering of the fluctuations of his character’s individual subjective experience.

From this, I hope to prove that an application of space syntax highlights the fact that the spaces of Crusoe’s habitation are fundamentally heterotopic: rather than simply creating and evolving in value, they are spaces where value is continually contested and inverted. Finally, the essay suggests that the conclusions drawn from considering the space syntax of Crusoe’s habitation might lead the way to viewing Robinson Crusoe and the novel form evolving in the eighteenth century as heterotopias.

(Re)configuring Crusoe’s Habitation: an application of space syntax theory to Robinson Crusoe

Shipwrecked: Disaster and Transformation in Homer, Shakespeare, Defoe and the Modern World presents the first comparative study of notable literary shipwrecks from the past 4,000 years, focusing on Homer's Odyssey , Shakespeare's The Tempest , and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe . The recurrent treatment of shipwrecks in epic poetry, drama, novels, science fiction, movies, and television demonstrates an enduring fascination with this archetypal scene: a shipwreck survivor confronting the elements. It is remarkable, for example, that the characters in the 2004 television show Lost share so many features with those from Homer's Odyssey and Shakespeare's The Tempest . When survivors are stuck on an island for some period of time, shipwrecks often present the survivor with the possibility of a change in political and social status--as well as romance and even paradise. In each of the major shipwreck narratives examined, the poet or novelist links the castaways' arrival on a new shore with the possibility of a new sort of life. James V. Morrison also considers the historical context as well as the "triggers" (such as the 1609 Bermuda shipwreck) that inspired some of these works, and modern responses such as novels (Golding's Lord of the Flies, Coetzee's Foe , and Gordon's First on Mars , a science fiction version of the Crusoe story), movies, television ( Forbidden Planet, Cast Away, and Lost ), and the poetry and plays of Caribbean poets Derek Walcott and Aime Cesaire.

James V. Morrison

Papers

Shipwrecked: Disaster and Transformation in Homer, Shakespeare, Defoe, and the Modern World