Book•
Shipwrecked: Disaster and Transformation in Homer, Shakespeare, Defoe, and the Modern World
22 Apr 2014-
TL;DR: In this article, a 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 is presented.
Abstract: 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.
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Journal Article•
58 citations
TL;DR: This article explored Cervantes's approach to shipwreck metaphor, identifying 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.
Abstract: 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).
6 citations
01 Jan 2020
TL;DR: The authors analyzed cartoons from The New Yorker magazine (1957) and the sitcom Gilligan's Island (1964-1967) and found that humour is located in an understanding of identity as communal, which is incongruous on an uninhabited island.
Abstract: 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.
1 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors apply space syntax theory to an analysis of the habitation built by Robinson Crusoe on his island and show that these spaces are fundamentally heterotopic: rather than simply creating and evolving in value, they are spaces where value is continually contested and inverted.
Abstract: 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.
1 citations
References
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Book•
01 Jan 1999
TL;DR: Guns, Germs, and Steel as discussed by the authors argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world, and argues that societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion and nasty germs and potent weapons of war.
Abstract: In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion --as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war --and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth club of California's Gold Medal
3,457 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1973
TL;DR: The Wild Man has played a role in politics, education, linguistics, anthropology, philosophy and literature, and the editors have prepared a diverse collection of essays to discuss these multifarious involvements as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The myth of the Wild Man began in antiquity and has existed ever since. He was thought to have been reared by animals and to have lived in isolation from man, having great physical strength and sexual potency, a covering of hair and aphasia. Individuals of this nature have occasionally been reported, such as that by Itard early in the nineteenth century, and no doubt the whole concept was based on reality. It was in fact Itard and others who demythologized the Wild Man, although vestigial remnants linger with us today in the form of the abominable snowman and King Kong. When, in the sixteenth century primitive man from various parts of the world became better known, he was evaluated in terms of a complex set of attitudes that had grown up around the Wild Man concept and many conflicting feelings were thereby aroused. He was the ignoble savage on the one hand and on the other became the Noble Savage, serving as an ideal "of all that was admirable and uncorrupted in human nature", and upon which so-called civilized man should model himself. There is also the fascinating idea of the savage or beast within us, "the dog beneath the skin", which has been used to account even for varieties of skin sensation, although this aspect is not discussed here. The Wild Man has played a role in politics, education, linguistics, anthropology, philosophy and literature, and the editors have prepared a diverse collection of essays to discuss these multifarious involvements. Each is a scholarly contribution, gracefully written and fully documented. For the historian of medicine, this is a fascinating topic of study, dealing with human nature, race and cultural attitudes. No one studying medicine or biology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can afford to be ignorant of it. Moreover the problems it raises are still with us, as evidenced by a recent polemic on the relationship between race and intelligence. This book is an excellent introduction to a problem which awaits further investigation from the medical, biological and anthropological viewpoints. It can be strongly recommended. The object of this book is to present translations of two French contributions to the subject of wolf children. The first is an excellent and well-documented survey of the whole subject, with a consideration of the fifty-three genuine examples reported, from the fourteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Professor Malson claims …
131 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1973
TL;DR: These essays represent the full range of Dodds' literary and philosophical interests, and his ability to combine profound scholarship with the lucid humanity of a teacher convinced of the value of Greek studies to the modern world.
Abstract: These essays represent the full range of Dodds' literary and philosophical interests, and his ability to combine profound scholarship with the lucid humanity of a teacher convinced of the value of Greek studies to the modern world.
109 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1994
TL;DR: Felson-Rubin this article explores the relationship between Homer's construction of Penelope and his more general approach to poetic production and reception, and argues that Homer's manipulation of penelope's character maintains the narrative fluidity and the dynamics of the "Odyssey", and reveals how the oral performance of the poem teases and captivates its audience.
Abstract: A coy tease, enchantress, adulteress, irresponsible mother, hard-hearted wife - such are the possible images of Penelope that Homer playfully presents to listeners and readers of the "Odyssey", and that his narration ultimately contradicts or fails to confirm. In "Regarding Penelope", Nancy Felson-Rubin explores the relationship between Homer's construction of Penelope and his more general approach to poetic production and reception. Felson-Rubin begins by considering Penelope as an object of male gazes (those of Telemachus, Odysseus, the suitors, and Agamemnon's ghost) and as a subject acting from her own desire. Focusing on how the audience might try to predict Penelope's fate when confronted with the different ways the male try to predict Penelope's fate when confronted with the different ways the male characters envision her, she develops the notion of "possible plots" as structures in the poem that initiate the plots Penelope actually plays out. She then argues that Homer's manipulation of Penelope's character maintains the narrative fluidity and the dynamics of the "Odyssey", and she reveals how the oral performance of the poem teases and captivates its audience in the same way Penelope and Odysseus entrap each other in their courtship dance. Homer, Felson-Rubin further explains, exploits the similarities between the poetic and erotic domains, often using similar terminology to describe them.
105 citations
Book•
01 Jan 2001
TL;DR: The Raft of Odysseus as mentioned in this paper explores the relationship between traditional myth and the real world, and argues that the resourcefulness and adaptability of the Iliadic characters served as an example to Homer's society which also had to adjust in inventive ways to turbulent conditions.
Abstract: The Raft of Odysseus looks at the fascinating intersection of traditional myth with an enthnographically-viewed Homeric world. Carol Dougherty argues that the resourcefulness of Odysseus as an adventurer on perilous seas served as an example to Homer's society which also had to adjust in inventive ways to turbulent conditions. The fantastic adventures of Odysseus act as a prism for the experiences of Homer's own listeners-traders, seafarers, storytellers, soldiers-and give us a glimpse into their own world of hopes and fears, 500 years after the Iliadic events were supposed to have happened. In the course of her argument, Dougherty makes liberal use of what we know about Mycenean and archaic artifacts, comparing the realities of historical shipbuilding or weaving, for example, with the often magnificently inflated account of the epics.
80 citations