Today’s Agenda:
1) Stewart Presentation on the Life and Times of Daniel Defoe (10 mins)
2) Short Paper expectations (due two weeks from today, good time to get started) (5-7 mins)
3) Journal Work:
a. In your journal, I want you to spend the next 10 mins writing on the following subject:
i. A few classes ago, I asked you where you saw yourself in 5, 15, or 20 years. Many of you expressed dreams that suggested you are far more interested in comfort that you are experience. However, it may be the case that, upon reflection, you would claim to be more interested in experience than comfort. So here’s your chance to explain yourself: What’s more important to you in life: experience or comfort? I would like you to explain to me why you feel draw to one way of life or the other? What are the benefits and drawbacks of either lifestyle? Go into detail.
b. Group discussion:
i. Many of you are encouraged to think of your training as a skill set that will help you with one specific activity in life: i.e it will help you with a specific kind of job. I want you to discuss another possibility: how might your education be used to help you deal with an awareness of the unknown, a sense of regret, and extended periods of individual confusion.
What do you remember about the reading?
Mini-Lecture:
So, we had a very exciting read here, and there are a few things that I want you to think about.
1st: We have not encountered anyone like Crusoe in this class before. While Chaucer invited us to consider something like “the middle class,” we have never before encountered anyone who simply had no training in any particular field. Crusoe begins this story as a kind of “everyman” example of a middle-class child child from the mid-seventeenth century. He tells us that he has no vocation, and that all he wants to do is travel.
As he begins to travel, we see that, even though he has no training, he is bright enough, brave enough, and powerful enough to deal with any situation is he confronted with: from being shipwrecked, to being enslaved, to running a plantation, to salvaging his ship after he is stranded in the Caribbean – there is nothing, apparently, that he cannot do. All with a basic public education, by the way.
Well, okay – we might wonder what it is about him that makes Crusoe so special. After all, we can’t imagine any of the characters we have come upon this semester, including Milton’s Satan, being so self-reliant. Even Milton’s Satan needs other people to get what he wants.
In Crusoe we have a very different kind of human being: he is not confused by the vastness of the world. He is not confused by the various cultures and people he meets. He is not scared of distance, or of total isolation. He is, in effect, the exact opposite of the witch burning morons we have been thinking about over the past two weeks. Crusoe is in every way an equal to the physical world.
As we notice that he is an equal to the physical world, it is important to notice how little he appears to consider religion and the spiritual world. There are several short references to God, must mostly they show up as warnings or curses. True, he does say that he regrets not thanking God for his survival of the ship wreck – but this is only after he tells us how supremely happy he is to survived.
Crusoe, in short, appears to not only need other people to survive; he also does not need God. We will seem him think about this issue as we go on, but it is important to notice this now, as this kind of persona is going to become a big part of our class over the next few weeks. In Crusoe, we have our first answer to the question of what is a human being: a human being is someone capable of adapting to change.
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