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AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies, Volume 4, Number2. May 2020 Pp. 91-104
The paper aims to demonstrate that Tournier’s Friday or the Other Island rewrites Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe within the context of the postmodern Lacanian psychoanalysis. The paper illustrates how literature shifts colors to match the surrounding environment. Defoe’s expresses the mode of thought of the Enlightenment that operates as a prelude to Western ethnocentricity, and Colonialism. It narrates the story of the unified conscious individual who has a solid faith in the efficiency of reason to understand objective reality. Such a perspective believes that language transparently represents an actual state of the world. Hence, Defoe’s adapts Realism as the mode of representation. Tournier modernizes the classical text to fit into the postmodern cultural context, which doubts the certainty of knowledge, introduces the notion of the split subject, and believes that language mediates reality. Tournier tells of the anecdote of the Lacanian split subject whose experience alternate among the registers of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. Therefore, anti-realism is Tournier’s style of representation. It adapts figurative language as a variety of the signifier to demonstrate that language is an independent entity that constructs subjectivity, reality, and the text. To advocate humanism, and tolerance Tournier utilizes Lacanian insights of the split subject, the uncertainty of knowledge, and meaning.
Al-Zoubi , W., & Shaheen, M. (2020). Michel Tournier’s Friday, or The Other Island: Rewriting Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe with Lacanian Signifiers. Arab World English Journal for Translation & Literary Studies 4 (2) 91-104.
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Waad Al-Zoubi is a Ph.D. candidate for the doctorate of Philosophy/ English Literature at the University of Jordan. My dissertation investigates Postmodern Metafictional Novel. I hold an M.A degree in English Language and Literature from the Middle East University, Jordan, Amman. I worked as a lecturer of English language at Issra University, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5708-2471
Prof, Mohammad Shaheen is an honorary professor of English Literature at the university of Jordan. Shaheen holds a Ph.D. degree in English literature from Cambridge University. Shaheen is the author and editor of numerous books and articles in English and Arabic. Recently, Shaheen has received the prize of Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences in the field of Arts and Literature for 2019, http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0587-1369
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