English Online Daniel Defoe and Robinson Crusoe TextBooks: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe ed. Michael Shinagel (Norton)
J.M. Coetzee, Foe (Penguin)
For those who were supposed to post online responses this week please post on the following passage: “I am not a story, Mr. Foe.
I may impress you like a story because I began my account of myself without preamble, slipping overboard into the water and striking out for the shore. but my life did not begin in the waves. There was a life before the water which stretched back to my desolate searching in Brazil, thence of the years when my daughter was still with me, and so on back to the day I was born. All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I owe proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world. I choose rather tell of the island, of myself and Cruso and Friday and what we three did there: for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire.” 131
