Liberal Education through Visual Media and reading the Novel: Reading and Watching Robinson Crusoe

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (15) ◽  
pp. 283-308
Author(s):  
Nagyung Sohn ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Education ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
Novel Reading

Temporal Structure and the Sacred in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Gemmill
Keyword(s):  
Linear Time ◽  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Dimensional Structure ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Everyday Experience ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Complex Theory ◽  
Novel Reading

Critics frequently agree that in the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse, Woolf transcends linear  time. In his article “History, Time and the Novel: reading Woolf’s To the Lighthouse”, however, Dominick LaCapra proposes a more complex theory of temporality, arguing that time has a two­  dimensional structure made up of a horizontal diachronic dimension, and a vertical synchronic dimension. The diachronic dimension comprises discrete “epochmaking events”, while the synchronic dimension  seemingly immobilizes a particular moment in defiance of linear time. Woolf’s narrative focuses on the synchronic dimension of time, thus subverting the traditional narrative structure that focuses on plot­  driving events that occur on the diachronic temporal plane. I believe that the thematic prominence of time and the sacred in “Time Passes” is not arbitrary; in fact, I argue that it is Woolf’s innovative conception of temporal structure that allows her to engage so profoundly with themes of the sacred. The synchronic dimension of time provides an escape from the limitations that linear time imposes on our experience of the sacred; in other words, the synchronic dimension is what allows Woolf seemingly to immobilize an  experience, to meditate on it in depth, and to convey more effectively the sacred nature of that experience. Throughout this section of To the Lighthouse Woolf suggests that by reframing how we exist in time, we can more readily feel the sacred that permeates everyday experience, and thus connect more intensely with  existence

Altruism and the Monks of Thelema

Walter Besant ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 151-170
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Education ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Francois Rabelais ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Liberal Humanism ◽  
Mass Democracy

The central concerns of Besant’s philanthropic novels of the 1880s were anticipated in 1878’s The Monks of Thelema: An Invention, his first sustained foray into social commentary. Although largely neglected by scholars, the novel is an intriguing satire that is rich with contemporary insights. In addressing the dilemmas of philanthropic activism, Besant mocks the naïve idealism associated with Oxford thinkers and undergraduates while finding positive value in their reformist schemes of liberal education for the emerging mass democracy. With the French humanist François Rabelais supplying a model for progressive liberal humanism, amid the satire Besant’s fiction develops a positive ideal of association and moral perfectibility that foreshadows his later, more celebrated work in philanthropy and social reform.

Crusoe’s Babel, Missionaries’ Mistakes

2021 ◽  
pp. 33-65
Author(s):  
Rebecca C. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Eating Habits ◽  
Cultural Hybridity ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Missionary Movement ◽  
Theory Of Value ◽  
The Right ◽  
A Minor

This chapter discusses Robinson Crusoe, the differences between the original and its Arabic translation, and how it was used as a tool for conversion by the Church Missionary Society (CMS) to guide Eastern Christians to the right path of Protestantism by emulating Crusoe's direct and individual spiritual awakening. CMS missionaries took active steps to discourage cultural hybridity, even monitoring the translators in their employment for signs of the Catholic influence. The fantasy of purity and process of purification were part of the foundation of the missionary movement, making Crusoe's own myth of individualism and fantasy of autonomy its perfect ideological surrogate. The CMS hoped they would find inspiration in Crusoe's spiritual trials and error, as he moves from rebellion to punishment, repentance, and eventually religious conversion. The observations that emerge from setting these two versions of Crusoe's eating habits side by side might amount to a minor point but for the fact that observing Crusoe's autonomous actions on the island have played an important role in theorizing what have been called the formal and cultural institutions of the novel: individual subjectivity, formal realism, colonial accumulation, the labor theory of value, national identity, to name a few. Many translators of this period adapted or changed the source material. Regardless of the radical changes, translators praised importance of the original version and often lamented their inability to do justice to it. As the earliest surviving translation of a novel into Arabic, Qiṣṣat Rūbinṣun Kurūzī stands as an ideal starting point from which to understand the origins of the Arabic novel as they emerge from translation.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 231-236
Author(s):  
Bill Bell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
Reading Habits ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Official Sources ◽  
The Web

The epilogue rounds off the argument by returning to Crusoe as a paradigm of the act of reading in the British empire. In the hands of different readers not even Robinson Crusoe was as straightforward as it seemed. Despite the fact that the novel has often been read as a manual for empire, it is far more complex than some commentaries would have us believe. Similar ambivalences apply to the lives and minds of many overseas British in the long nineteenth century. While the early twentieth century is commonly thought to have embodied a decline in imperial values, the reading habits of colonial subjects throughout the period would seem to indicate that imperial assurances were less robust than official sources would seem to suggest. The five reading constituencies that are described in the foregoing chapters, all of them in different ways operating within the web of empire, were ones in which individuals often found imperial confidence in its own mission wanting, something that was time and again demonstrated through in their acts of reading.

Robinson Crusoe and the Inception of Speech

2021 ◽  
pp. 73-90
Author(s):  
Kevin Ohi
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
Character Formation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Psychological Novel

Dwelling on the strange redundancies and formal excesses of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, this chapter traces in the novel’s paradoxically exorbitant consolidation of interiority the inception of the psychological novel. In the novel’s allegory, Crusoe is removed (by two shipwrecks) to his solitary island, where the social can be reconstituted and produced as a drama of one. The chapter explores several instances of the expropriating, anticipatory, self-grounding structure of character formation in the novel: the dream anticipating the appearance of Friday, whose language lessons are anticipated, in turn, by the speech of the parrot. Briefly considering J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, the chapter then turns to Jean-Claude Milner’s essay “Être-Seul,” which traces a paradoxical relation between the speaking subject and the social world of speech, one that rhymes with Defoe’s allegory of inception. The solitude of the speaking being, Milner suggests, is the ground of his speaking. Marooned by the very faculty of speech that would ostensibly allow us to address another or others, this solitude, however, portends a paradoxical form of community. We have it, paradoxically, in common, that we are each of us alone; Milner’s account of the solitude of speech thus illuminates the layered account of inception in Defoe.

The Wisdom of the Novel in Richard Rorty’s philosophy as an example of postmodern humanism

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 153-161
Author(s):  
Patryk Kaczmarek
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Liberal Education ◽  
The Novel

The article presents the reconstruction of the edifying subjectivity derived from Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism. The functions of Master Novels that fit the trend of liberal education and postmodern humanism have also been described. I argue in favor of a thesis that the recognition of the Wisdom of the Novel widely spread in culture can contribute to social change. The effect of this change may consist in a decrease in the amount of social exclusion of various groups and the existence of ideological radicalisms, which may contribute to the progression of solidarity among people.

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