Popular culture is a term which describes how people in a society live. As time elapses, popular culture keeps on evolving and a society's values will consistently transform. In 1719 during the post-revolution, famous English novelist Daniel Defoe composed the well-received novel "The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe." Remaining a popular adventure narrative, around three hundred years later, Robert Zemeckis directed the modern mainstream film "Cast Away", a popular culture appropriation of Robinson Crusoe which entertains as well as powerfully reflecting the values and attitudes of the twentieth century responders.
Although composed more three hundred years apart, both texts aims at mature audiences with concerns for the concept of journeys. However, the difference is that in both of the texts, other concepts besides journeys had been supplemented, shaped and explored due to the different contexts from post-revolution to the age of American self-independence. The book tend to be aimed at readers with an interest in the religious inner journey of repentance and the physically journey of traveling and trades, whereas Cast Away is aimed basically all audiences as its element of physical journey is not as strong as the book and the protagonist had been made into a more realistic "everyman."
When Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe, it was the beginning of the sixteenth century which witnessed many historical disasters such as the London fire and some great changes in economic order. There were a rise in capitalism which caused an individual's place in society being determined based not on their family rank but their own work. During this time, romantic love was secondary to economic gain. The century...
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... film and possibly implies that their love will last forever, just like how time will never stop flowing. Another symbolism used may be that of the four roads Noland was driving on in the beginning and ending scene. This repetition of the four roads forms a cycle and underlines a conformity about life - history repeats itself.
Resonating upon the old, the film Cast Away has successfully transformed Robinson Crusoe with a different set of contemporary values and attitudes which reflects the society of the later 1990s through its characterization, intertextuality and various other visual and aural techniques. Not only this, Cast Away also provides audience a dramatic entertainment with perhaps some moral lessons such as courage and survival to ponder about. At the same time, it had skillfully challenged some modern issues on the society and American individuals.
In the late eighteenth century arose in literature a period of social, political and religious confusion, the Romantic Movement, a movement that emphasized the emotional and the personal in reaction to classical values of order and objectivity. English poets like William Blake or Percy Bysshe Shelley seen themselves with the capacity of not only write about usual life, but also of man’s ultimate fate in an uncertain world. Furthermore, they all declared their belief in the natural goodness of man and his future. Mary Shelley is a good example, since she questioned the redemption through the union of the human consciousness with the supernatural. Even though this movement was well known, none of the British writers in fact acknowledged belonging to it; “.”1 But the main theme of assignment is the narrative voice in this Romantic works. The narrator is the person chosen by the author to tell the story to the readers. Traditionally, the person who narrated the tale was the author. But this was changing; the concept of unreliable narrator was starting to get used to provide the story with an atmosphere of suspense.
Phillips, Gene D. Conrad and Cinema: The Art of Adaptation. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1995.
In the stories “To Set Our House in Order” and “The Lamp at Noon” the authors are both able to effectively communicate that alienation is self-inflicted, while using multiple different techniques. As a result it becomes apparent that each author can take a similar approach to the alienation of a character in the story yet develop the theme in a unique way.
Classic narrative cinema is what Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (The classic Hollywood Cinema, Columbia University press 1985) 1, calls “an excessively obvious cinema”1 in which cinematic style serves to explain and not to obscure the narrative. In this way it is made up of motivated events that lead the spectator to its inevitable conclusion. It causes the spectator to have an emotional investment in this conclusion coming to pass which in turn makes the predictable the most desirable outcome. The films are structured to create an atmosphere of verisimilitude, which is to give a perception of reality. On closer inspection it they are often far from realistic in a social sense but possibly portray a realism desired by the patriarchal and family value orientated society of the time. I feel that it is often the black and white representation of good and evil that creates such an atmosphere of predic...
When Arthur Miller published “The Crucible” in 1953, the play’s audience was a nation of Americans seized in the grip of McCarthyism. The Communist “witch hunt” has long since ended, but the public’s fascination with this shameful piece of American history has not. The original play unfolded over the course of 4 acts that mainly consisted of dialogue. As a result, the creators of the 1996 movie adaptation had an ample degree of creative latitude to update the narrative for a modern audience. Director Nicholas Hytner utilized a host of cinematic techniques that enabled the moving images to tug the heartstrings of the audience just as effectively as the book had done before. Given the temporal limitations of a film, several scenes were rewritten in order to facilitate an easier delineation of the plot line. The director also used different camera techniques to control the pace of the movie, making it easier to tell which parts were important. Overall, Hytner’s scene modifications and unique camera shots resulted in an emotionally compelling film.
Both Daniel Defoe and Robinson Crusoe’s living conditions varied throughout their lives. These gentlemen were both born in England defoe in London, and Crusoe in York. However Defoe was a real human being and actually went through some of the troubles that Crusoe faced. At an early age both Defoe and Crusoe had to rely on their parents for support. They both lived in an average, middle sized home. In the middle of their lives Defoe was living in a small horrid house. At the same time Crusoe was living in an extremely small hut in the middle of nowhere on a deserted island. Later in Defoe’s life he gained his feet, he was no longer struggling, and once again had a very nice, middle classed home. Later in Crusoe’s life he got off of the island, and lived at a plantation for a little bit. He then so...
Film and literature are two media forms that are so closely related, that we often forget there is a distinction between them. We often just view the movie as an extension of the book because most movies are based on novels or short stories. Because we are accustomed to this sequence of production, first the novel, then the motion picture, we often find ourselves making value judgments about a movie, based upon our feelings on the novel. It is this overlapping of the creative processes that prevents us from seeing movies as distinct and separate art forms from the novels they are based on.
The political, ideological, and economic climate of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was ideal for allowing the Romantic Revolution to take hold and flourish. It began primarily in England and France, but soon spread to much of Europe and to the United States. This essay will focus on the Romantic’s relationship with the natural world, their distaste for the Industrial Revolution, and how the Romantic poets valued imagination and emotional connections. The Romantics had a lasting impact on European and American society, political ideals, and the regard we hold for ideals and values such as nature and childhood. The Romantic’s ideas ran counter to much of the thinking of the intellectual community and to the values of industry and government of the time. By changing and challenging the minds of the masses to think differently they created a revolution in literature.
Watt, Ian. Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1996.
"Daniel Defoe achieved literary immortality when, in April 1719, he published Robinson Crusoe" (Stockton 2321). It dared to challenge the political, social, and economic status quo of his time. By depicting the utopian environment in which was created in the absence of society, Defoe criticizes the political and economic aspect of England's society, but is also able to show the narrator's relationship with nature in a vivid account of the personal growth and development that took place while stranded in solitude. Crusoe becomes "the universal representative, the person, for whom every reader could substitute himself" (Coleridge 2318). "Thus, Defoe persuades us to see remote islands and the solitude of the human soul. By believing fixedly in the solidity of the plot and its earthiness, he has subdued every other element to his design and has roped a whole universe into harmony" (Woolf 2303).
Daniel Defoe tells tale of a marooned individual in order to criticize society. By using the Island location, similar to that of Shakespeare's The Tempest, Defoe is able to show his audience exactly what is necessary for the development of a utopian society. In The Tempest, the small society of Prospero's island addresses the aspects of morality, the supernatural and politics in the larger British society. In Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, the island's natural surroundings highlights the subject of man's individual growth, both spiritually and physically. Nature instantly exercises its power and control over man in the tropical storm that leads to the wreckage of Crusoe's ship. "The fury of the sea" (Defoe, 45) thrusts Crusoe to the shores of the uninhabited "Island of Despair" (Defoe, 70). Isolated on the island, Crusoe is challenged to use his creativity in order to survive.
The novel Robinson Crusoe was written in 1719 by Daniel Defoe in London. It can be separated into three parts that include Crusoe’s life before the shipwreck, the twenty-eight years that he was stranded on an island, and his experiences after being rescued from the island. The first section of the book is basically about how Crusoe didn’t take his father’s advice in not pursuing a life at sea. He goes out to sea anyway and at first has some successes, but by the third time, his luck had run out. Most of the book focuses on his time stranded on an island off the coast of Venezuela. Throughout his time on the island, Crusoe is able to start a life for himself and become stronger in faith. The last section of the book is about his escape from the island when he learns he isn’t the only one there. There are also cannibals living on the island. Luckily, he is able to find another native man named Friday, and rescues him from the cannibals. He teaches the man his skills and converts his religion. After much trial, they are able to leave the island and escape to En...
Robinson Crusoe is an excellent adventure story since its publication in 1719; both the novels and the hero have become popular to everyone. The surface of this novel tells only an adventure story, but a conscious reading of the novel shows that colonialism is technically presented underneath the storyline where issue such as race, power identity formation and so on are presented from a colonial perspective. Robinson Crusoe is not just an adventurous fiction, it is a story in which a European man gradually masters his own compulsion and extends his control over a huge, indifferent, and hostile environment. The protagonist of the novel is a typical colonial character. He sets on a distant Caribbean island to establish his own colony, his own civilization and his own culture. Defoe deals with colonialism by portraying a wonderful fictional picture of an adventurous man, who gradually becomes a master over an island and establishes his own colony. In Robinson Crusoe representation of colonialism is clearly reflected through the relationship between the colonized and colonizer, representation of a colonized land and people, and representation of colonialism from the viewpoint of trade, commerce and buildings empire. Robinson Crusoe is known as an allegorical novel. Religiously this novel asserts a kind of “spiritual journey” of the protagonist, economically it is a story for the expansion of the trade and from psychological perspective Robinson Crusoe deals with an alien. But this chapter will try to demonstrate the extent to colonialism which shapes the novel.
Daniel Defoe has frequently been considered the father of realism in regards to his novel, Robinson Crusoe. In the preface of the novel, the events are described as being “just history of fact” (Defoe and Richetti ). This sets the tone for the story to be presented as factual, while it is in of itself truly fiction. This is the first time that a narrative fictional novel has been written in a way that the story is represented as the truth. Realistic elements and precise details are presented unprecedented; the events that unfold in the novel resonate with readers of the middle-class in such a way that it seems as if the stories could be written about themselves. Defoe did not write his novel for the learned, he wrote it for the large public of tradesmen, apprentices and shopkeepers (Häusermann 439-456).
Robinson Crusoe is a story of a young man who decided to disobey his father’s wishes of being a lawyer and go to sea at only nineteen. After a long boisterous trip, the ship he is on becomes wrecked in a strong storm. Although this happens he still desires to be at sea so strongly he decided that he will set out to sea once again.