Approaches to Teaching Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, ed. by Maximillian E. Novak and Carl Fisher

Abstract

134 cargues-Grant’s Tristram Shandy stimulates discussion, raises issues without forcing a narrow vision, and makes one turn to the book itself. Peter De Voogd Universiteit Utrecht Approaches to Teaching Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, ed. Maximillian E. Novak and Carl Fisher. New York: MLA, 2005. Pp. xxii ⫹ 243. $19.75. Approaches to Teaching Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is one of the best books to have appeared so far in the quartercentury -long series of ‘‘Approaches to Teaching World Literature’’ as pedagogical guides designed primarily for teachers of undergraduate students: ‘‘primarily ’’ because many of the approaches would work equally well with graduate students. Indeed, one of the most stimulating entries from the collection’s twenty-three contributors, Robert Markley ’s ‘‘Teaching the Crusoe Trilogy,’’ seems better suited for a graduate seminar than undergraduate courses in which few instructors would have the time to teach Defoe’s The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and The Serious Reflections, in addition to Robinson Crusoe. Given the range of suggestions , methods, and examples offered in this collection, one comes away from it convinced that Robinson Crusoe could easily be the focus of undergraduate and graduate seminars. In light of the vast amount of secondary material on Defoe, his oeuvre, and recent biographies of his life, Messrs. Novak and Fisher have concisely and fair-mindedly identified and described the ‘‘Materials,’’ including internet resources , available to teachers of Robinson Crusoe. Their ‘‘Approaches’’ are subdivided into often inevitably overlapping groups. The first, ‘‘Defoe and the History of English Narrative,’’ includes four essays that usefully contextualize Defoe’s most famous novel. Robert Maniquis’s ‘‘Teaching The Pilgrim ’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe; or, From Filthy Mire to the Glory of Things,’’ enables students to appreciate Defoe’s revolutionary treatment of ‘‘realistic ’’ detail. In ‘‘Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels: Some Pedagogical Frameworks,’’ Richard Braverman tells how he teaches the Travels with Crusoe to demonstrate competing early eighteenth-century assessments of exploration and colonialism. Roxanne Kent-Drury and Gordon Sayre introduce their students to parodic intertextuality through an investigation of the reception history of Crusoe (‘‘Robinson Crusoe’s Parodic Intertextuality’’). Invoking Max Weber and Ian Watt in ‘‘Weber, Watt, and Restraint: Robinson Crusoe and the Critical Tradition,’’ Manuel Schonhorn sees Defoe’s Crusoe as a transitional figure between earlier religious and modern economic conceptions of the hero. The next section, ‘‘Intellectual and Ideological Contexts,’’ comprises Geoffrey Sill’s comparative ‘‘Myths of Modern Individualism: Defoe, Franklin, and Whitman,’’ which argues for Defoe’s role in the development of the myth of the self-made man. The connections Mr. Sill draws among his three authors seem tenuous. Far more convincingly, Paula R. Backscheider compares and contrasts Crusoe in ‘‘Crusoe among the Travelers ’’ to contemporaneous travel narratives , including ones by women, to see Crusoe as a transitional figure between an older world of mysterious spiritual forces and a new world comprehensible through scientific investigation. George E. Haggerty’s excellent ‘‘Thank God It’s 135 Friday: The Construction of Masculinity in Robinson Crusoe’’ exposes the often comic effects of Crusoe’s ultimately successful attempts to assert his ‘‘masculine mastery’’ of people and places. In ‘‘Robinson Crusoe and EarlyEighteenth -Century Racial Ideology,’’ Roxann Wheeler largely recapitulates part of her argument in The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (2000) to use the figures of Xury and Friday to show her students that modern-day notions of race are historically contingent. Mr. Markley’s approach reveals how thin the resolution of contradictions in the first volume of the Crusoe trilogy remains. Close reading is the subject of Timothy C. Blackburn’s perceptive ‘‘Robinson Crusoe as Literary Art,’’ which opens the section on ‘‘Formal and Thematic Approaches.’’ John Barberet takes a more comparativist approach in his insightful ‘‘Messages in Bottles: A Comparative Formal Approach to Castaway Narratives,’’ contrasting castaway and utopian fictions to argue convincingly that Crusoe is more the former than the latter. Widening his approach even further than Barberet, in ‘‘A Semester on Crusoe’s Island’’ Matthew Wickman has his students read Crusoe in conjunction with essays by the cultural theorists Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and François Lyotard to enable them to recognize the kinds of exchanges and...