Literature is, therefore, in the broad sense of the word, a tool in the hand of the writer to control the reader; it is a vehicle in which the educated writer can propagate his thoughts, views of life, and politics.

1. Presented by:
Baraa Merheb
Engl. 310
Literary Theories and Methods
Dr. Mazen Naous
2013-2014

2. ,
THE CAPITALIST,
A WORKING CLASS
EDUCATOR
AND MENTOR

3. THE THREE LITERARY THEORISTS INVOLVED
Terry Eagleton
*Literary Theory: An Introduction
Karl Marx
*The German Ideology,
*The Working-Day,
*Preface to A Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy
 Frederich Jameson
*The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic
Act

4. Terry Eagleton views literature as having a more
significant role than simply being concerned with
“beauty and spiritual uplift” (Reader, 2137). He
thinks that literature is not simply “an innocent,
pleasurable entertainment” (Reader, 2138), but it
has political effects and social significance that
reinforce the “dominant social order” (Reader,
2138). It reflects the social conflicts of the lower
classes, and even more, it controls the middle and
working classes.

5. “Eagleton asserts that the discipline of literature,
like formal religion, is deeply involved in the
production of the dominant social order”
(Reader, 2137), thus, lining with the Marxist
theory in the value it gives to the historical and
social connections of literary texts that can
“actively produce ideology” (Reader, 2138).

6. Karl Marx and Frederich Engels
Marxism is mainly interested in the material or economic
structure of a society. Marx stresses that “The mode of
production of material life conditions the social, political
and intellectual life process in general. It is not the
consciousness of men that determines their being, but,
on the contrary, their social being that determines their
consciousness.” (Reader, 648)
Moreover, Marx and Engels argue that “economic and
social forces shape human consciousness” (Reader, 648).

7. HOROUGHGOING
Marx explains that ideology naturally conceals “the
reality of class struggle from our perception and
consciousness; and insofar as working-class people
unconsciously absorb bourgeois values, they are
unwitting carriers of ‘false consciousness’”(Reader, 649).
Marx points out that “under capitalism, human relations
are increasingly characterized by more or less
thoroughgoing alienation, monetization, and
commodification” (Reader, 649).

8. Frederic Jameson
Jameson calls for a revival of Marxism that used to focus
on the external connections of literary texts with society,
politics, and history, and not just on the texts internal
features. He argues that “the political and economic
history form the subtexts and allegorical meanings of
literary works” (Reader, 1818).
He “sees Marxist criticism not as exclusionary or
separatist but as comprehensive, assimilating a
compendium of sources [social, political, and
economic]and thereby achieving greater ‘semantic
richness’” (Reader, 1819).

9. Frederic Jameson
In his interpretation, Jameson refers to three levels:
“Jameson focuses on ‘the individual work… grasped
essentially as a symbolic act’” (Reader, 1819).
He also considers the text is “the ideolgeme, that is, the
smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic
collective discourses of social classes” (Reader, 1819).
Finally, Jameson considers the work of literature is linked
with the mode of production by “the ideology of form”
(Reader, 1819).

10. As all the above theorists agree in their belief that
literature has a far more intriguing function, a more
complicated one, than just entertaining the public, I
thought it relevant to incorporate them in proving my
thesis.
Though the character of Crusoe is represented by Defoe
as the rebellious young man who sought transcendence
from his middle social class, Robinson Crusoe is meant
to establish the dominant social order and shape the
political and economical ideology of the working class
of the time.

11. The message conveyed by Robinson Kreutznaer in Robinson
Crusoe is a multifarious message. It presents, discusses, and
teaches social, political and economical ideas indirectly.
1 2
3
1 When Crusoe left his father’s house, he was the rebellious
young man who wanted to transcend his social level. He
suffered all kinds of punishments; he survived all the
shipwrecks, witnessed the death of all his companions, and
lived for more than twenty years alone in exile on a far,
uninhabited island.
The way of life of the “king” Crusoe on the island and his
2
feelings and thoughts all foster the political policies of the
Kingdom at the time the novel was written.

12. On his first landing on the island, Crusoe acted as if he
possessed it. He described his first dwelling as “a thick
bushy tree like a fir, but thorny… where I resolved to sit
all night, and consider the next day what death I should
die…” (Defoe, 26).
This description of the harsh new land and the dangers it
has on the European represents the political ideology of
the time the novel was written about new conquered lands.

13. However, despite the aggressive nature of the island, Crusoe
walked trough and searched it for water which he found and
drank. This act represents the raping of the natural resources
of the colonized countries by the Europeans. Moreover,
Crusoe calls the place he dwelt “my apartment in the tree”
(Defoe, 27), illustrating by this the appropriation of the land
by the colonizers.
This appropriation of the land was also represented by
Crusoe’s killing of the “wild beasts”, the original inhabitants
of the island.

14. He says, “I had no sooner fired, than from all parts of the
wood there arose an innumerable number of fowls, of many
sorts, making a confused screaming and crying…” (Defoe, 29).
Crusoe confirmed his power over the inhabitants of the island,
and scared them out in order to secure himself against these
“savages” and “beasts”, thus establishing his superior and
dominant social class.
Moreover, the appropriation of the land allowed Crusoe to
build a “home (…my tent and my cave)” (Defoe, 53).

15. He called the place he built there “my house” (32), “my
habitation” (34), “my country house and my sea-house” (53)
later his castle and fortifications, eventually the whole island
becomes his island. He finally expresses it clearly that “I
might call myself king or emperor over the whole country
which I had possession of…” (66)
Moreover, the novel seems to spread important ideas
2
concerning the social structure of a community. A person
can transcend his social position and become a wealthier
person by working hard and devoting himself to work.

16. Defoe transplants this idea within his novel to mislead the working
class and make them work harder to realize their dreams of wealth,
thus incorporating in the progress and evolution of their capitalist
society. He wants the lower and middle class people to feel like
realizing their dreams through literature, thus relieved in reality.
Crusoe can do in the novel what many of the working class people
can not do in reality. He left his father’s house, and thus his middle
class position, to become a wealthier person.
Throughout the novel, we see Crusoe growing wealthier and
gaining position. He becomes an owner of plantation, the king,
governor, and commander of the island, a slave owner, and a
wealthy trader.

18.  “Crusoe and Friday … are depicted as autonomous, rational individuals
who voluntarily enter into mutually beneficial trade once they discover
the benefits of specialization in production” (Samson, 146).
 Crusoe “was the prototypical 'rational man.' He accepted and worked
within his limitations, and he exploited all of the resources available to
him (including the wreckage of his ship)” (Samson)
 “After twenty-five years of solitary existence Crusoe was almost a self-made
man” (Samson).
 “Once Friday arrived on the island, … Crusoe now had another person
who performed labour for him in order to help him achieve his own
goals of producing for his subsistence and escaping from the island.
This Crusoe, who was dependent on the unpaid labour of another
person, had much more in common with men in the real world …”
(Samson)

19.  In Robinson Crusoe, by isolating first his hero and then
a small group of settlers and returning them to a state
of nature, Defoe was attempting to illustrate some of
his most basic economic concepts, which for
convenience may be divided into three economic
principles: a theory of invention, a theory of value and
an economic theory of society” (Novak, 473).
 “It was necessity alone, Defoe argued, which destroyed
sloth and gave birth to society” (Novak, 475).

20.  Crusoe's often-analyzed departure from his father's house is a
rejection of the social order into which he was born. His
predilection for the sea represents his fascination with a
liminal state in which the seemingly rigorous shipboard order
required for safety and successful commerce is persistently
threatened by nature, by the fragility of social bonds far from
home, and by an ambiguous political order (Zimmerman, 506).
 extreme responses to cannibalism are often quite properly
taken as a reflection of the attitudes undergirding colonialism
and thus relevant to Defoe's endorsement of an imperialistic
commercial society.
 Cannibalism may also, however, be taken as a reflection of
Crusoe's fears about the consequences of the untrammeled
pursuit of individual wealth” (Zimmerman, 508).

21. Works Cited
*Novak, Maximillian E. "Robinson Crusoe and
Economic Utopia." The Kenyon Review (1963): 474-490.
*Samson, Melanie. "Towards a 'Friday' Model of
International Trade: A Feminist Deconstruction of Race
and Gender Bias in the Robinson Crusoe Trade
Allegory." The Canadian Journal of Economics 28.1
(1995): 143-158.
*Zimmerman, Everett. "Robinson Crusoe and No
Man's Land." The Journal of English and Germanic
Philosophy 102.4 (2003): 506-529.

22. Presented by: Baraa Merheb
Thank you for listening