Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Romancing the real: the “field” of criminal biography
- 2 Defoe's realism: rough frames, strange voices, surprisingly various subjects and readers made more present to themselves
- 3 The copious text: opening the door to inference, or, room for those who know how to read it
- 4 Intimations of an invisible hand: the mind exercised, enlarged, and kept in play by strange concurrences
- 5 The general scandal upon business: unanswerable doubts, and the text as a field supporting very nice distinctions
- 6 The frontiers of dishonesty, the addition and concurrence of circumstances: more on the strategic situating of names
- 7 Notions different from all the world: criminal stupidity, the self, and the symbolic order
- Closing comments: truth, complexity, common sense, and empty spaces
- Index
7 - Notions different from all the world: criminal stupidity, the self, and the symbolic order
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Romancing the real: the “field” of criminal biography
- 2 Defoe's realism: rough frames, strange voices, surprisingly various subjects and readers made more present to themselves
- 3 The copious text: opening the door to inference, or, room for those who know how to read it
- 4 Intimations of an invisible hand: the mind exercised, enlarged, and kept in play by strange concurrences
- 5 The general scandal upon business: unanswerable doubts, and the text as a field supporting very nice distinctions
- 6 The frontiers of dishonesty, the addition and concurrence of circumstances: more on the strategic situating of names
- 7 Notions different from all the world: criminal stupidity, the self, and the symbolic order
- Closing comments: truth, complexity, common sense, and empty spaces
- Index
Summary
It will be impossible to bring vice out of fashion if we cannot bring men to an understanding of what it really is; but could we prevail upon a man to examine his vice, to dissect its parts, and view the anatomy of it; to see how disagreeable it is … how despicable and contemptible in its highest fruition; how destructive to his senses, estate, and reputation; how dishonorable, and how beastly, in its public appearances: such a man would certainly be out of love with it.
Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, p. 87I was in a kind of Stupidity … I had a Mind full of Horrour … but my Thoughts got no Vent … I had a silent sullen kind of Grief, which cou'd not break out either in Words or Tears.
You go upon different Notions from all the World; and tho' you reason upon it so strongly, that a Man knows hardly what to answer, yet I must own, there is something in it shocking to Nature, and something very unkind to yourself.
Roxana, pp. 129, 156Such is the power of words, that mankind is able to act as much evil by their tongues as by their hands; the ideas that are formed in the mind from what we hear are most piercing and permanent.
Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, p. 81The knowledge of things, not words, makes a scholar.
The Complete English Tradesman, p. 212- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Crime and DefoeA New Kind of Writing, pp. 200 - 244Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993