Mar 28, 2024  
2021-2022 Westminster College Catalog 
    
2021-2022 Westminster College Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENG 440 - After Crusoe

Semester Hours: 4

Americans are fascinated by survivor stories. So let’s look at their literary history. Daniel DeFoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe will serve as the central story in this course that considers the literary representation of castaways and survivors. Most importantly, we will look at the tendency of castaways to reconstitute their homeland’s social systems as they colonize “new” or “uncivilized” worlds. To understand this phenomenon, we will begin with Shakespeare’s castaway drama, The Tempest, which offers a seminal view of the struggle between the colonizer, Prospero, and the colonized, Caliban. Sometimes, the colonized write back. We will consider this act in at least one novel, including the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee’s novel Foe, a postcolonial revision of the Robinson Crusoe story. Finally, we will look at how the castaway or survivor story figures into modern and contemporary American culture through a consideration of films and “reality” TV.