Survival Narratives In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island And Yann Martel’s Life Of Pi: An Intertextual Dialogic And Cultural Materialist Study

Résumé: The present work studies all of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island (1874) and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001) from both an Intertextual Dialogic and a Cultural Materialist approach. The purpose of this dissertation is, on the one hand, to draw parallels and direct comparison between Defoe’s source text and Verne’s literary adaptation and, on the other hand, to discuss the marked differences between Defoe’s masterpiece and Martel’s narrative. The main focus of this dissertation is to analyse the evolution of the Robinsonade genre through evaluating the change witnessed in its perspectives and ideologies. To achieve this goal, this work will be based on Bakhtin’s two prominent concepts of ‘Stylization’ and ‘Polemic’ combined with his “Dialogism” developed in his books entitled The Dialogic Imagination (1981) and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984). Furthermore, we will also adopt and explore Raymond Williams’s theory of Cultural Materialism particularly his concepts of ‘Residual’, ‘Dominant’ and ‘Emergent’ ideologies of culture which he introduced in his two books entitled Marxism and Literature (1977) and Culture and Materialism (1980). Our analysis of the three novels under scrutiny shows that Verne’s The Mysterious Island is, to a certain degree, a stylization of Defoe’s classical Robinsonade, while Martel’s modern and contemporary novel might be read as an overt polemic directed at Defoe’s canonical work. Additionally, our study reveals that each novel portrays different ideologies which are developing through time and adapting to new changes depending on the author’ s ideological stance as well as novel’s settings

Publié dans la revue: