Home > assh > kunapipi > Vol. 17 (1995) > Iss. 3
Abstract
Your pen, your ink, I know, but somehow the pen becomes mine while I write with it. as though growing out of my hand.1 J. M. Coetzee's 1986 novel, Foe, presents itself as a 'source' or earlier version of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Its fictional premise, which places Susan Barton on the same island Crusoe and Friday inhabited, uses names and other recognizable details from Defoe to signal the complex literary relationship between the two novels.2 Foe is a parody of Robinson Crusoe in the sense in which Linda Hutcheon defines parody as 'imitation characterized by ironic inversion', or 'repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity'. 3 By including 'critical distance' in the very definition of parody, Hutcheon shows that she views all parodies as in some sense critical of their source texts, although in practice there is a great range to the amounts and types of criticism suggested by different parodic texts. Whether a given parody is socially or politically subversive, however,
Recommended Citation
Hoegberg, David E., 'Your pen, your ink': Coetzee's Foe, Robinson Crusoe, and the Politics of Parody, Kunapipi, 17(3), 1995.
Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol17/iss3/17
