• 영어영문학
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• 제64권4호
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• pp.629-649
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• 2018

To date, one of the prevailing criticisms of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe has seen the adventure novel as a celebration of the rise of mercantile capitalism and the beginnings of colonialism. From this point of view, the Englishman has often been interpreted as an early embodiment of the concept of the sovereign economic subject. Prominent social critics who took up this interpretation have included Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Within literary studies proper, the work of Ian Watt offered perhaps the earliest version of this point of view of the novel. Influenced by both Weber and Rousseau, Ian Watt argued that Defoe's wandering protagonist embodies the rise of economic individualism. More recent criticism has tended to challenge this dominant interpretation by laying greater stress on such countervailing factors as Crusoe's mental uncertainty and inner conflict. Drawing inspiration from Fredric Jameson's diagnosis of the ills of late capitalism, this paper analyzes the ways in which Defoe's hero, rather than championing modern rationality, can in fact be seen as suffering from many forms of emotional psychosis. Robinson Crusoe can, after all, be better viewed as a contradictory multi-layered text that, despite its outward valorization of economic individualism, portrays its hero as a victim of negative capitalistic forces, a hero driven by his desire to possess but haunted by a fear of loss, a hero who flaunts inflated feelings of self-worth even as he reveals deflated notions of material insecurity and mental persecution.

• 디지털콘텐츠
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• 3호통권142호
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• pp.80-83
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• 2005

모든 이야기 예술의 창작은‘만약에, ~이라면’이라는 상황의 가정에서 시작된다고 한다. 스타니 슬라브스키가‘매직 이프(Magic If)’라고 명명한 이 창작의 발상방법에서 거의 모든 극적 상황들이 탄생한다. 멜 깁슨이 주연했던 영화 <왓 위민 원트(what women want)>는‘만약 내귀에 여자들의 속마음이 들린다면’이라는 가정에서 출발한영화다. 또<로빈슨크루소>는‘만약 내가 무인도에 고립된다면’이라는 가정에서 만들어진 유명한 소설이다. 비교적 최근 등장한 게임은 어떨까? <파이널 판타지10>은‘만약 내가 실존인물이 아니고 다른 사람의 꿈이 만들어낸 가짜 존재라면’이라는 가정에서 출발한다.