Literary Islands

Islands feature very often in literature and it is the goal of this course to understand why this is so. We could take our point of departure from the poet John Donne’s famous claim that “no man is an island” and understand that to mean that human beings crave relations with other human beings, and this is why isolating ourselves on a real or metaphorical island, all alone, is something we resist. Already, however, we discern the figurative utility of the island: it helps us approach the existential topic of solitude itself. What is it to be alone? Might solitude sometimes be something a person actually desires? Some of the literary texts we will read in this class will help us respond to these questions, but philosophy will also help us too, since it also wishes to understand the emotional and physical experience of solitude. For that reason, philosophers often deploy islands – philosophical islands in this case – in order to ponder the nature of that very experience. We will accordingly read extracts from the philosophers Martin Heidegger, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Emmanuel Levinas to assist us. The very topography of an island is important – it is self-contained and unconnected to any mainland. And this is useful if one wishes to imagine an isolated community, unthreatened by any invaders crossing the sea. It is why, as we shall see, remote islands are locations where writers can imagine different ways of being in a community, untouched and unaffected by the rest of the world. How about living in a utopian community, for instance? We will read extracts of Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis for that very reason. Might that community be only constituted by men? We will read extracts of Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines to find out what that might look like, and compare that patriarchal isle to islands populated solely by women – these are feminist islands in an appreciable sense. Hence two texts set on islands: Eliza Heywood’s Memoirs of an Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia from which we will read selected extracts, and Pierre de Marivaux’s short play The Colony which we will read in its entirety. Of course, one of the most famous islands is described by Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe. We will read extracts from that text, but also make the comparative gesture by juxtaposing a version or rewriting of Robinson Crusoe, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Crusoe’s Footprint, a novel which provides him a way to reflect on colonialism and the slav