Required Reading:

Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

• Robinson Crusoe (HTML) (Microsoft Reader e-Book)
• "Travel, Trade, and the Expansion of Empire" (from the "Restoration and the 18th Century" unit of Topics Online, an online companion to the Norton Anthology of English Literature). The submenus ("Texts and Contexts," "Explorations," etc.) are also worth checking out if you have the time.
• Peter Hulme, "Robinson Crusoe and Friday," from Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797 (London: Methuen, 1986). This is a large file in PDF format; it requires the free Adobe Reader [already installed in all Academic Computing labs].) N.B.: You may skip sections 2 and 3 of this essay.

Coetzee, Foe:

• Gayatri Spivak, "Theory in the Margin: Coetzee's Foe Reading Defoe's Roxana/Crusoe" (from Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson, eds., Consequences of Theory [Johns Hopkins UP, 1991]). This is a large file in PDF format. N.B.: You may skip from the bottom of p. 155, "Faced with this double-bind," through the bottom of p. 156, "can then begin to operate"; and from the bottom of p. 159, "I am ready" through the top of p. 161, "will not yield its inscription."
• Coetzee's 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance lecture, "He and His Man"