CU-MA-English-SEM-III-Literary Theory-Second draft

ItaloSvevo (1861–1928): Zeno's Conscience (1923); RyūnosukeAkutagawa (1861–1928): \"Hana\" (1916); \"Rashōmon\" (1915); \"In a Grove\" (1922); 51 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

2.4THE MAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF MODERN LITERATURE: The characteristics of the Modern Literature can be categorized into Individualism, Experimentation, Symbolism, Absurdity and Formalism. 1-Individualism: In Modern Literature, the individual is more interesting than society. The Modern writers presented the world or society as a challenge to the integrity of their characters. Ernest Hemingway is especially remembered for vivid characters who accepted their circumstances at free value. 2-Experimentation Modernist writers broke free of old forms and techniques. Poets abandoned traditional rhyme schemes and wrote in free verse. Novelists defied all expectations. Writers mixed images from the past with modern languages and themes, creating a collage of styles. The inner workings of consciousness were a common subject for modernists. This preoccupation led to a form of narration called stream of consciousness. Authors James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, along with poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, are well known for their experimental Modernist works. 3-Absurdity The carnage of two World Wars profoundly affected writers of the period. Several great English poets died or were wounded in WWI. For many writers, the world was becoming a more absurd place every day. Modernist authors depicted this absurdity in their works. 4-Symbolism The Modernist writers infused objects, people, places and events with significant meanings. The idea of a poem as a riddle to be cracked had its beginnings in the Modernist period. Symbolism was not a new concept in literature, but the Modernists' particular use of symbols was an innovation. They left much more to the reader's imagination than earlier writers. 5-Formalism 52 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Writers of the Modernist period saw literature more as a craft than a flowering of creativity. The idea of literature as craft fed the Modernists' desire for creativity and originality. Modernist poetry often includes foreign languages, dense vocabulary and invented words. Other Characteristics of Modern Literature: 1-In contrast to the Romantic worldview, the Modernist writers care little for nature. 2-In their literary works, The Modernist writers were interested in deeper reality than surface reality. 3-In other words, there was a less emphasis on art's reflection of external reality. 4-Most of the literary works of the Modern Age were influenced by the disillusionment that came after the World War II. 5-Irony, satire and comparisons are used frequently to illustrate points in regard to society. 6-Modern Literature with its modern themes and techniques appeared as a reaction against the Victorian Age with its restrictions and traditions. 7-There is no such thing as absolute truth. All things are relative. 8-According to the Modernists, life is unordered. 9-language is seen as complex. 10-Modernist fiction spoke of inner self and consciousness, and many writers of that age adapted the stream of consciousness technique in their writings, such as James Joyce in his literary work: Ulysses. 11-Instead of progress, the Modernist writer saw a decline of civilization. 12-whereas earlier, most literature had a clear beginning, middle, and end (or introduction, conflict, and resolution), the Modernist story was often a more of a stream of consciousness. Modernism and the structure of the literary works 1-character: A disappearance of character summary. This is clear in Dickens' literary works such as Great Expectations. 2-plot: 53 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Most of the plots of the Modern literature are different from that of the ancient works. The Modernists did not use plots with sudden climactic turning points and clear resolutions. Instead, they used plots with open unresolved endings. 3-Style: In their literary works, The Modernist writers adapted the stream of conscious technique. Virginia Woolf and James Joyce are regarded as the master of using this literary technique in writing. Finally, Modernism also abandoned one of the most fundamental types of character: the hero. What constitutes heroism has always aroused debate. The typical protagonist of modernism having lost faith in society, religion and the surrounding environment, seem also to have lost any claim to heroic action. 2.5POST MODERN LITERATURE Postmodern literature is literature characterized by reliance on narrative techniques such as fragmentation, paradox, and the unreliable narrator; and often is (though not exclusively) defined as a style or a trend which emerged in the post–World War II era. Postmodern works are seen as a response against dogmatic following of Enlightenment thinking and Modernist approaches to literature. Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, tends to resist definition or classification as a \"movement\". Indeed, the convergence of postmodern literature with various modes of critical theory, particularly reader-response and deconstructionist approaches, and the subversions of the implicit contract between author, text and reader by which its works are often characterised, have led to pre-modern fictions such as Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605, 1615) and Laurence Sterne's eighteenth-century satire TristramShandy being retrospectively considered by some as early examples of postmodern literature. Postmodern writers are seen as reacting against the precepts of modernism, and they often operate as literary \"bricoleurs\", parodying forms and styles associated with modernist (and other) writers and artists. Postmodern works also tend to celebrate chance over craft, and further employ metafiction to undermine the text's authority or authenticity. Another characteristic of postmodern literature is the questioning of distinctions between high and 54 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

low culture through the use of pastiche, the combination of subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature. Playwrights who worked in the late 19th and early 20th century whose thought and work would serve as an influence on the aesthetic of postmodernism include Swedish dramatist August Strindberg, the Italian author Luigi Pirandello, and the German playwright and theorist Bertolt Brecht. In the 1910s, artists associated with Dadaism celebrated chance, parody, playfulness, and challenged the authority of the artist. Tristan Tzara claimed in \"How to Make a Dadaist Poem\" that to create a Dadaist poem one had only to put random words in a hat and pull them out one by one. Another way Dadaism influenced postmodern literature was in the development of collage, specifically collages using elements from advertisement or illustrations from popular novels (the collages of Max Ernst, for example). Artists associated with Surrealism, which developed from Dadaism, continued experimentations with chance and parody while celebrating the flow of the subconscious mind. André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, suggested that automatism and the description of dreams should play a greater role in the creation of literature. He used automatism to create his novel Nadja and used photographs to replace description as a parody of the overly-descriptive novelists he often criticized. Surrealist René Magritte's experiments with signification are used as examples by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Foucault also uses examples from Jorge Luis Borges, an important direct influence on many postmodernist fiction writers. He is occasionally listed as a postmodernist, although he started writing in the 1920s. The influence of his experiments with metafiction and magic realism was not fully realized in the Anglo-American world until the postmodern period. Ultimately, this is seen as the highest stratification of criticism among scholars. Postmodernism broadly refers to a socio-cultural and literary theory, and a shift in perspective that has manifested in a variety of disciplines including the social sciences, art, architecture, literature, fashion, communications, and technology. It is generally agreed that the postmodern shift in perception began sometime back in the late 1950s, and is probably still continuing. Postmodernism can be associated with the power shifts and dehumanization of the post-Second World War era and the onslaught of consumer capitalism. The very term Postmodernism implies a relation to Modernism. Modernism was an earlier aesthetic movement which was in vogue in the early decades of the twentieth century. It has 55 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

often been said that Postmodernism is at once a continuation of and a break away from the Modernist stance. Postmodernism shares many of the features of Modernism. Both schools reject the rigid boundaries between high and low art. Postmodernism even goes a. step further and deliberately mixes low art with high art, the past with the future, or one genre with another. Such mixing of different, incongruous elements illustrates Postmodernism’s use of light- hearted parody, which was also used by Modernism. Both these schools also employed pastiche, which is the imitation of another’s style. Parody and pastiche serve to highlight the self-reflexivity of Modernist and Postmodernist works, which means that parody and pastiche serve to remind the reader that the work is not “real” but fictional, constructed. Modernist and Postmodernist works are also fragmented and do not easily, directly convey a solid meaning. That is, these works are consciously ambiguous and give way to multiple interpretations. The individual or subject depicted in these works is often decentred, without a central meaning or goal in life, and dehumanized, often losing individual characteristics and becoming merely the representative of an age or civilization, like Tiresias in The Waste Land. In short, Modernism and Postmodernism give voice to the insecurities, disorientation and fragmentation of the 20th century western world. The western world, in the 20th century, began to experience this deep sense of security because it progressively lost its colonies in the Third World, worn apart by two major World Wars and found its intellectual and social foundations shaking under the impact of new social theories an developments such as Marxism and Postcolonial global migrations, new technologies and the power shift from Europe to the United States. Though both Modernism and Postmodernism employ fragmentation, discontinuity and de-centredness in theme and technique, the basic dissimilarity between the two schools is hidden in this very aspect. Modernism projects the fragmentation and de-centredness of contemporary world as tragic. It laments the loss of the unity and centre of life and suggests that works of art can provide the unity, coherence, continuity and meaning that is lost in modern life. Thus Eliot laments that the modern world is an infertile wasteland, and the fragmentation, incoherence, of this world is affected in the structure of the poem. However, The Waste Land tries to recapture 56 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

the lost meaning and organic unity by turning to Eastern cultures, and in the use of Tiresias as protagonist In Postmodernism, fragmentation and disorientation is no longer tragic. Postmodernism on the other hand celebrates fragmentation. It considers fragmentation and de-centredness as the only possible way of existence, and does not try to escape from these conditions. This is where Postmodernism meets Poststructuralism —both Postmodernism and Poststructuralism recognize and accept that it is not possible to have a coherent centre. In Derridean terms, the centre is constantly moving towards the periphery and the periphery constantly moving towards the centre. In other words, the centre, which is the seat of power, is never entirely powerful. It is continually becoming powerless, while the powerless periphery continually tries to acquire power. As a result, it can be argued that there is never a centre, or that there are always multiple centres. This postponement of the centre acquiring power or retaining its position is what Derrida called difference. In Postmodernism’s celebration of fragmentation, there is thus an underlying belief in difference, a belief that unity, meaning, coherence is continually postponed. Comparisons with modernist literature Both modern and postmodern literature represents a break from 19th century realism. In character development, both modern and postmodern literature explore subjectivism, turning from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness, in many cases drawing on modernist examples in the \"stream of consciousness\" styles of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, or explorative poems like The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. In addition, both modern and postmodern literature explore fragmentariness in narrative- and character- construction. The Waste Land is often cited as a means of distinguishing modern and postmodern literature. The poem is fragmentary and employs pastiche like much postmodern literature, but the speaker in The Waste Land says, \"these fragments I have shored against my ruins\". Modernist literature sees fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis, or Freudian internal conflict, a problem that must be solved, and the artist is often cited as the one to solve it. Postmodernists, however, often demonstrate that this chaos is insurmountable; the artist is impotent, and the only recourse against \"ruin\" is to play within 57 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

the chaos. Playfulness is present in many modernist works (Joyce's Finnegans Wake or Virginia Woolf's Orlando, for example) and they may seem very similar to postmodern works, but with postmodernism playfulness becomes central and the actual achievement of order and meaning becomes unlikely. Gertrude Stein's playful experiment with metafiction and genre in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) has been interpreted as postmodern. 2.6SHIFT TO POSTMODERNISM As with all stylistic eras, no definite dates exist for the rise and fall of postmodernism's popularity. 1941, the year in which Irish novelist James Joyce and English novelist Virginia Woolf both died, is sometimes used as a rough boundary for postmodernism's start. The prefix \"post\", however, does not necessarily imply a new era. Rather, it could also indicate a reaction against modernism in the wake of the Second World War (with its disrespect for human rights, just confirmed in the Geneva Convention, through the rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust, the bombing of Dresden, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, and Japanese American internment). It could also imply a reaction to significant post-war events: the beginning of the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, postcolonialism (Postcolonial literature), and the rise of the personal computer (Cyberpunk fiction and Hypertext fiction). Some further argue that the beginning of postmodern literature could be marked by significant publications or literary events. For example, some mark the beginning of postmodernism with the first publication of John Hawkes' the Cannibal in 1949. Post-war developments and transition figures Though postmodernist literature does not include everything written in the postmodern period, several post-war developments in literature (such as the Theatre of the Absurd, the Beat Generation, and Magic Realism) have significant similarities. These developments are occasionally collectively labelled \"postmodern\"; more commonly, some key figures (Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar and Gabriel GarcíaMárquez) are cited as significant contributors to the postmodern aesthetic. The work of Jerry, the Surrealists, Antonin Artaud, Luigi Pirandello and so on also influenced the work of playwrights from the Theatre of the Absurd. The term \"Theatre of 58 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

the Absurd\" was coined by Martin Esslin to describe a tendency in theatre in the 1950s; he related it to Albert Camus's concept of the absurd. The plays of the Theatre of the Absurd parallel postmodern fiction in many ways. The work of Samuel Beckett is often seen as marking the shift from modernism to postmodernism in literature. He had close ties with modernism because of his friendship with James Joyce; however, his work helped shape the development of literature away from modernism. Joyce, one of the exemplars of modernism, celebrated the possibility of language; Beckett had a revelation in 1945 that, in order to escape the shadow of Joyce, he must focus on the poverty of language and man as a failure. Magic Realism is a technique popular among Latin American writers (and can also be considered its own genre) in which supernatural elements are treated as mundane (a famous example being the practical-minded and ultimately dismissive treatment of an apparently angelic figure in Gabriel GarcíaMárquez's \"A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings\"). 2.7 COMMON THEMES AND TECHNIQUES Several themes and techniques are indicative of writing in the postmodern era. These themes and techniques, discussed below, are often used together. For example, metafiction and pastiche are often used for irony. These are not used by all postmodernists, nor is this an exclusive list of features. Irony, playfulness, black humour Linda Hutcheon claimed postmodern fiction as a whole could be characterized by the ironic quote marks, that much of it can be taken as tongue-in-cheek. This irony, along with black humour and the general concept of \"play\" (related to Derrida's concept or the ideas advocated by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text) are among the most recognizable aspects of postmodernism. Though the idea of employing these in literature did not start with the postmodernists (the modernists were often playful and ironic), they became central features in many postmodern works. In fact, several novelists later to be labelled postmodern were first collectively labelled black humourists: John Barth, Joseph Heller, William Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut, Bruce Jay Friedman, etc. Intertextuality 59 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Since postmodernism represents a decentred concept of the universe in which individual works are not isolated creations, much of the focus in the study of postmodern literature is on intertextuality: the relationship between one text (a novel for example) and another or one text within the interwoven fabric of literary history. Intertextuality in postmodern literature can be a reference or parallel to another literary work, an extended discussion of a work, or the adoption of a style. Pastiche Related to postmodern intertextuality, pastiche means to combine, or \"paste\" together, multiple elements. In Postmodernist literature this can be an homage to or a parody of past styles. It can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or information-drenched aspects of postmodern society. It can be a combination of multiple genres to create a unique narrative or to comment on situations in postmodernity. Metafiction Metafiction is essentially writing about writing or \"foregrounding the apparatus\", as it's typical of deconstructionist approaches, making the artificiality of art or the fictionality of fiction apparent to the reader and generally disregards the necessity for \"willing suspension of disbelief.\" For example, postmodern sensibility and metafiction dictate that works of parody should parody the idea of parody itself.Metafiction is often employed to undermine the authority of the author, for unexpected narrative shifts, to advance a story in a unique way, for emotional distance, or to comment on the act of storytelling. HistoriographicMetafiction Historiographical Metafiction is the term used for works of fiction which combine the literary devices of metafiction with historical fiction. Works regarded as historiographicmetafiction are also distinguished by frequent allusions to other artistic, historical and literary texts (i.e., intertextuality) in order to show the extent to which works of both literature and historiography are dependent on the history of discourse. It incorporates three domains: fiction, history, and theory. Historiographical Metafiction is a kind of postmodern novel in most of the writings. It rejects projecting present believes and standards on the past and asserts the specificity and particularity of individual past events. 60 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Fabulation Fabulation is a term sometimes used interchangeably with metafiction and relates to pastiche and Magic Realism. It is a rejection of realism which embraces the notion that literature is a created work and not bound by notions of mimesis and verisimilitude. Thus, fabulation challenges some traditional notions of literature the traditional structure of a novel or role of the narrator, for example and integrates other traditional notions of storytelling, including fantastical elements, such as magic and myth, or elements from popular genres such as science fiction. Temporal distortion This is a common technique in modernist fiction: fragmentation and nonlinear narratives are central features in both modern and postmodern literature. Temporal distortion in postmodern fiction is used in a variety of ways, often for the sake of irony. Magic realism Magic realism may be literary work marked by the use of still, sharply defined, smoothly painted images of figures and objects depicted in a surrealistic manner. The themes and subjects are often imaginary, somewhat outlandish and fantastic and with a certain dream- like quality. Some of the characteristic features of this kind of fiction are the mingling and juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic or bizarre, skilful time shifts, convoluted and even labyrinthine narratives and plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and fairy stories, expressionistic and even surrealistic description, arcane erudition, the element of surprise or abrupt shock, the horrific and the inexplicable. It has been applied, for instance, to the work of Jorge Luis Borges, and Gabriel GarcíaMárquez. Techno culture and hyperreality Fredric Jameson called postmodernism the \"cultural logic of late capitalism\". \"Late capitalism\" implies that society has moved from the industrial age and into the information age. Likewise, Jean Baudrillard claimed postmodernity was defined by a shift into hyperreality in which simulations have replaced the real. In postmodernity people are inundated with information, technology has become a central focus in many lives, and our understanding of the real is mediated by simulations of the real. Many works of fiction have dealt with this aspect of postmodernity with characteristic irony and pastiche. 61 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Paranoia Perhaps demonstrated most famously and effectively in Joseph Heller's Catch-22, the sense of paranoia, the belief that there's an ordering system behind the chaos of the world is another recurring postmodern theme. For the postmodernist, no ordering is extremely dependent upon the subject, so paranoia often straddles the line between delusion and brilliant insight.A prototype of postmodern literature, presents a situation which may be \"coincidence or conspiracy – or a cruel joke\". This often coincides with the theme of techno culture and hyperreality. Maximalism Dubbed maximalism by some critics, the sprawling canvas and fragmented narrative of such writers as Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace has generated controversy on the \"purpose\" of a novel as narrative and the standards by which it should be judged. The postmodern position is that the style of a novel must be appropriate to what it depicts and represents. Minimalism Literary minimalism can be characterized as a focus on a surface description where readers are expected to take an active role in the creation of a story. The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional. Generally, the short stories are \"slice of life\" stories. Minimalism, the opposite of maximalism, is a representation of only the most basic and necessary pieces, specific by economy with words. Minimalist authors hesitate to use adjectives, adverbs, or meaningless details. Instead of providing every minute detail, the author provides a general context and then allows the reader's imagination to shape the story. Among those categorized as postmodernist, literary minimalism is most commonly associated with Jon Fosse and especially Samuel Beckett? Fragmentation Fragmentation is another important aspect of postmodern literature. Various elements, concerning plot, characters, themes, imagery and factual references are fragmented and dispersed throughout the entire work. In general, there is an interrupted sequence of events, character development and action which can at first glance look modern. Fragmentation purports, however, to depict a metaphysically unfounded, chaotic universe. It can occur in language, sentence structure or grammar. 62 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

2.8 SUMMARY Postmodernism broadly refers to:  a socio-cultural and literary theory,  and a shift in perspective that has manifested in a variety of disciplines including the social sciences, art, architecture, literature, fashion, communications, and technology.  The very term Postmodernism implies a relation to Modernism. Modernism was an earlier aesthetic movement which was in vogue in the early decades of the twentieth century. It has often been said that Postmodernism is at once a continuation of and a break away from the Modernist stance.  Thus, the basic difference between the modernism and postmodernism, according to Eagleton is modernism denies being a commodity whereas postmodernism neither affirms nor denounces the co modification of art but simply accept it as it is. 2.9 KEYWORDS  Temporal distortion: A narrative with a non-linear timeline. That is, a story that does not follow a chronological order.  Metafiction: Metafiction is a style of prose narrative in which attention is directed to the process of fictive composition.  Fabulation:noun literary criticism A style of modern fiction, similar to magical realism and postmodernism 2.10LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. Find out more about postmodern thinkers. __________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ 2.11UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions 63 Short Question CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

1. Discuss common themes and techniques of postmodernism? 2. Explain the structure of literary works? 3. What are the common characteristics of modernism? 4. What is Modernism? 5 What is Postmodernism? Long Questions 1. How did modernism influence postmodernism? 2. What are the main features of postmodernism? 3. What are the main differences between modernism and postmodernism? 4. Discuss in detail about the main characteristics of modern literature? B. Multiple Choice Questions 1. Postmodernists typically argue that a. 'Universalist' narratives which attempt to explain the world are invariably false b. The world is socially constructed in a variety of ways c. Differences of viewpoint should be celebrated not deplored d. All of these 2. What is pointed by a strong and international break with tradition? 64 a. Industrialization b. Post-Modernism c. Modernism d. Globalization CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

3. Modernism as a literary movement is associated with which period? 65 a. after World War I b. before World War I c. after World War II d. before World War II 4.Postmodern literature characterized by a. Fragmentation b. Paradox c. Reliable narrator d. Option a. and b 5. Postmodernism broadly refer to a ___ and ___theory. a. Socio culture and literary b. Socio historical and conventional c. Socio historical and cultural d. Socio culture and conventional Answer 1-a, 2-c, 3-a, 4-d, 5-a 2.12 REFERENCES Reference’s book CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 Peter Barry: Beginning Theory (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995).  Raman Selden: A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1985).  Ann Jefferson & David Robey, eds.: Modern Literary Theory (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1982).  Terry Eagleton: Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).  Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976).  Krishnaswamy et al.: Contemporary Literary Theory: A Student’s Companion (New Delhi: Macmillan, 2000).  Jonathan Culler: Barthes (Great Britain: Fontana, 1983). Website  https://www.britannica.com/art/Greek-literature  https://www.ancient.eu/Greek_Literature/  https://www.edutry.com/Study-material/  https://www.ancient.eu/aristotle/  https://www.iep.utm.edu/aris-poe/  https://www.britannica.com/topic/Poetics  http://ignou.ac.in/  https://www.uoc.ac.in/  http://www.tmv.edu.in/ 66 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT – 3 ROLAND BARTHES: “THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR” Structure 3.0 Learning Objectives 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Literary Style and Criticism 3.3 Critical Analysis of Roland Barthes “The Death of The Author” 3.4 Summary 3.5Keywords 3.6 Learning Activity 3.7Unit End Questions 3.8 References 3.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, you will be able to:  Acquaint the learnings of Roland Barthes.  The lesson analyses Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author.”  Answer the examination-oriented questions. 3.1 INTRODUCTION Roland Barthes was born in Cherbourg, France November 12, 1915 to bourgeoisie parents. He was the son of military officer Louis Barthes, who was killed during a battle during war I within the North Sea before his son was one year old. His mother, Henriette Barthes, and his aunt and grandmother raised him. At age of 11 Barthes moved to Paris and that’s where he attended school. Barthes worked hard as a student and spent the amount from 1935 to 1939 at Sorbonne University, where he earned a license in classical letters. Barthes throughout his life had health issues and had repeated bouts of tuberculosis, which frequently had to be 67 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

treated in isolation. His repeated physical breakdowns disrupted his academic career, affecting his studies and his ability for qualifying for examinations. While being kept out of the main French universities meant that he had to travel far for teaching positions. His life from 1939 to 1948 was largely spent obtaining a license in grammar and philology, publishing his papers, participating during a medical study, and continuing to struggle together with his health. He received a diplômed’étudessupérieures (roughly like an MA thesis) from the University of Paris in 1941 for his add Greek tragedy. Later he to academic work, and got opportunities in France, Romania, and Egypt. This was also the time where he started contribute to the leftist Parisian paper Combat, which later on became his full-time job, of Writing Degree Zero (1953). In 1952, Barthes moved on to the Centre National de la RechercheScientifique where he studied lexicology and sociology. During his seven-year period, he began to write down his popular bi-monthly essays for the magazine Les LettresNouvelles, during which he dismantled myths of popular culture (gathered within the Mythologies collection that was published in 1957). Not being well versed in English he befriended Richard Howard for his English translations for most of his work. Barthes spent the first 1960s exploring the fields of semiology and structuralism, chairing various faculty positions around France, and continuing to supply more full-length studies. His work challenged no only traditional academic practices but also criticised work of renowned figures of literature. His unorthodox thinking led to a conflict with a well-known Sorbonne Professor of literature, Raymond Picard, who attacked the French criticism for its obscurity and lack of respect towards France’s literary roots. Barthes’ negation in Criticism and Truth (1966) accused the old, bourgeois criticism of a scarcity of concern with the finer points of language and of selective ignorance towards challenging theories, like Marxism. By the late 1960s, Barthes was popular and travelled to US and Japan, delivering a presentation at Johns Hopkins University. During this point, he wrote his best-known work, the 1968 essay “The Death of the Author” which, in light of the growing influence of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, would convince be a transitional piece in its investigation of the logical ends of structuralist thought. Barthes continued to contribute with Philippe Sollers to the avant-garde literary magazine Tel Quel, which was developing similar sorts of theoretical inquiry which were to be pursued in Barthes’ writings. In 1970, Barthes produced what many concede to be his most prodigious work, the critical reading of Balzac’s Sarrasine entitled S/Z. Throughout the 68 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

1970s, Barthes not only continued to develop his literary criticism but also developed new ideals of textuality and novelistic neutrality. Roland Barthes’ sharp criticism contributed to the event of theoretical schools like structuralism, semiotics, and post structuralism. While his influence is especially found in these theoretical fields with which his work brought him into contact, it's also felt in every field concerned with the representation of data and models of communication, including computers, photography, music, and literature. One consequence of Barthes’ breadth of focus is that his legacy includes no following of thinkers dedicated to modelling themselves after him. The very fact that Barthes’ work was ever adapting and refuting notions of stability and constancy means there's no canon of thought within his theory to model one’s thoughts upon. 3.2LITERARY STYLE AND CRITICISM Barthes’s literary style, which was always stimulating though sometimes eccentric and needlessly obscure, was widely imitated and parodied. Some thought his theories contained brilliant insights, while others regarded them simply as perverse contrivances. But by the late 1970s Barthes’s intellectual stature was virtually unchallenged, and his theories had become extremely influential not only in France but throughout Europe and within the USA. Other leading radical French thinkers who influenced or were influenced by him included the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, socio-historian Michel Foucault, and philosopher Derrida. Two of Barthes’s later books established his late-blooming reputation as a stylist and writer. He published an “antiautobiography,” Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes), and his Fragments d’un discoursamoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse), an account of a painful romance, was so popular it quickly sold quite 60,000 copies in France. After his death several posthumous collections of his writings are published, including A Barthes Reader (1982), edited by his friend and admirer Sontag, and Incidents (1987). Barthes’s Oeuvres completes (“Complete Works”) were published in three volumes in 1993–95. Barthes also attempted to reinterpret the mind-body dualism theory. Like Friedrich Nietzsche and Levinas, he also drew from Eastern philosophical traditions in his critique of European culture as \"infected\" by Western metaphysics. His body theory emphasized the formation of the self through bodily cultivation. The idea, which is additionally described as ethico-political entity, considers the thought of the body together 69 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

that functions as a \"fashion word\" that gives the illusion of a grounded discourse. This theory has influenced the work of other thinkers like Jerome Bel. Other Interests Throughout his career, Barthes had an interest in photography and its potential to speak actual events. Many of his monthly myth articles within the 50s had attempted to point out how a photographic image could represent implied meanings and thus be employed by bourgeois culture to infer 'naturalistic truths'. But he still considered the photograph to possess a singular potential for presenting a totally real representation of the planet. When his mother, Henriette Barthes, died in 1977 he began writing optical device as an effort to elucidate the unique significance an image of her as a toddler carried for him. Reflecting on the connection between the apparent symbolic meaning of a photograph (which he called the studium) which is only personal and hooked in to the individual, that which 'pierces the viewer' (which he called the punctum), Barthes was troubled by the very fact that such distinctions collapse when personal significance is communicated to others and may have its mathematical logic rationalized. Barthes found the answer to the present fine line of private meaning within the sort of his mother's picture. Barthes explained that an image creates a falseness within the illusion of 'what is', where 'what was' would be a more accurate description. As had been made physical through Henriette Barthes's death, her childhood photograph is evidence of 'what has ceased to be'. rather than making reality solid, it reminds us of the world's ever-changing nature. His final works before his death, optical device was both an ongoing reflection on the complicated relations between subjectivity, meaning and cultural society also as a touching dedication to his mother and outline of the depth of his grief. Death Roland Barthes died on 26th March 1980, at the age of 65 at the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital in Paris. He suffered severe chest injuries on Feb. 25 when he was struck by a car on a Paris street, and had been on a respirator in the hospital's intensive care unit since them. Reference Book Jonathan Culler: Barthes (Great Britain: Fontana, 1983). 70 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

3.3 CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF ROLAND BARTHES “THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR” “The Death of the Author” is an essay written in 1967 by Roland Barthes. It’s a highly influential and provocative essay and makes various significant development and changes within the field of literary criticism. Barthes's essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of a text, and instead argues that writing and creator are unrelated. The essay's first English-language publication was within the American journal Aspen, no. 5–6 in 1967; the French debut was within the magazine Manteia, no. 5 (1968). The essay later appeared in an anthology of Barthes's essays, Image-Music-Text (1977), a book that also included his \"From Work to Text\". Through this relative short but artistic piece of labour, Barthes critiques and shakes up the normal way of approaching and analysing the text, one that's too author-centric: which is just too focused in trying to find the intentions of the author and analysing the life and background of the author to unravel the meaning of the text rather than just assessing the content of the text alone. In the first paragraph, Barthes tries to elucidate the elemental concept he lays forward in his essay through the character of Zambinella taken from Sarrasine, a novella written by Balzac. Talking about this character, who is really a castrato (a castrated male) disguised as a lady, Balzac writes, “It was Woman, together with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling.” Barthes poses an issue of whether it's ever possible to understand whose ideas are coming forth in these expressions. Is these the character of that novella speaking? is it the person Balzac speaking together with his preconceived knowledge and prejudice of girls or is it someone else? Basically, what Barthes makes us realise as a reader is that one can never find surely through what a specific character is talking if it's the private opinion of the author coming through the mouth of that character or somebody else. In the similar fashion of what W.K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley neutralize their essay titled “The Intentional Fallacy”, Barthes also warns the reader to not pay unnecessary 71 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

attention to neither the lifetime of the author nor the ‘real meaning’ that author was trying to mention through his work. According to Barthes, the intentions of the author are irrelevant. The work isn’t a particular replica of his intentions and within the process of giving words to the thoughts, writer intentionally or unintentionally is involved during a process of meaning-making on which he has not complete control because the author/ writer isn’t a God. Thus, the pursuit of trying to work out the author’s intentions are an entire distraction and unnecessary as albeit the author is alive (which is that the not the case several times if the author is dead), one can’t be fully certain if the author is genuine about his intentions. And, just in case albeit the author is honestly telling his intentions behind what he has written, there's no guarantee that author was successfully ready to depict that in his work, which might not only show a supposed failure but actually add beauty to the text thanks to the varied possible interpretations that it'd offer. Barthes makes two details on why the death of the Author is an inevitable and beneficial occurrence to start with Barthes states that the author is simply how through which a story is told. They neither create the story nor form it, these have already been done. The author is simply retelling this story that has already been told. His argument against original thought is extremely persuasive, especially considering the various ways stories are logically weakened into a predictable sequence of events. For example, Vladimir Propp (Literary Theory) a Russian Formalist used Formalist theories to work out thirty-one plot functions in Russian folk tales. Each folk tale has a minimum of some, if not all, of those functions, typically within the order which he has organized them but occasionally one or two are going to be inverted. Latest fairy tales are merely an adaptation of a classic fairy tale and that they follow the overall functions that Propp outlined. Even beyond fairy tales, most fiction stories fall under a typical pattern with a beginning problem, a training period, a group back of the hero, the hero overcoming the obstacle, the conflict, and eventually resolution. There are not any original thoughts, just old thoughts combined in several patterns or adjusted to suit the present society. Music, fashion, and films are an example of the never-ending recycling of ideas. There are only numerous musical combinations or clothing styles that folks find pleasing. It’s inevitable that old styles are going to be wont to 72 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

“inspire” new ones. It’s easy to ascertain altogether different areas of society how there are few no new ideas, merely old ideas being reused. Barthes second point is that if the reader were to look at the run through the Author’s eyes then there might be no gain and joy in reading. By associating the Author with the text, the text is automatically limited, rather than drawing their own meaning from the text using their own experiences and thus stimulating their own thoughts of their lives and the way it connects with the planet around them the reader is then restricted to trying to guess what the author meant. The reader focuses on understanding the Author’s opinions and whether or not they accept as true with the Author and don’t specialize in their own thoughts and opinions of the piece. Barthes claims that it's the status of the reader that ought to be elevated, not the status of the Author. If the reader gains any deep insight from a bit of writing it shouldn't be considered thanks to the Author’s genius but instead to the private experiences of the reader providing them with an insightful interpretation. Barthes believes that if it's the reader who brings aiming to the text then there is often no limit to the interpretations available because everyone within the world has their own unique experiences that have shaped them. For the independent thinking of readers and therefore the growth of their skills of interpretation the death of the Author is important, in most cases. The death of the Author isn't always a necessary occurrence however, in some cases the presence of the Author is required for the reader to realize a greater understanding of what's being read. As an example, within the book Slaughterhouse 5: A Children’s Crusade, Vonnegut went through great effort to form himself known at the start of the book the whole first chapter is told in person from the author’s point of deem he rambles about how he wanted to write down a book about the bombing of Dresden. He was there when Dresden was bombed and was one among the sole survivors. the primary chapter of the book he describes how he has wanted to write down a book about the bombing of Dresden for years but he’s never been ready to find the proper words. “There’s nothing intelligent to mention a few massacres.” Vonnegut said. After spending the primary chapter introducing the reader to himself Vonnegut then proceeds to require himself out of the story (for the foremost part) and instead tell the story of Billy Pilgrim. Pilgrim had also survived the bombing of Dresden but a head injury later in life combined with post-traumatic stress disorder caused Pilgrim to lose his grip on reality. Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time and being unstuck causes him to 73 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

cut back and forth from the past to the longer term and back again. As a reader if one had not known Vonnegut’s background together of the few survivors of the bombing of Dresden then one might haven't been ready to understand the book and instead of drawing any meaning out of the book it would have seemed as a crazy and disjointed effort. However, rummaging through the eyes of the Author a different perceptive is understood. If the Author is writing on a subject of which the reader will have their own past experiences to match it to then the birth of the reader must come at the value of the death of the Author. However, if the reader has no experiences on which to base their judgments or to understand the meaning of the text with then it'd be necessary for the Author to inform the reader of their own experiences. Some accept as true with Barthes when he says that the reader and therefore the readers interpretation and understanding of a text is what's important. However, sometimes the understanding of the reader is best helped by the presence of the Author. That being said, the Author should only make an appearance if it'll help the understanding of the reader. Here again, the main target is on the reader and their understanding, not on the Author. It’s inevitable though that some readers will have a particular mindset before they even read due to the author’s name. The reader may have liked or disliked earlier work of the author and depending which they will already have a preconceived notion. Some readers are known to shop for entire series after reading the primary book because they know they just like the Author and his or her work. Authors want to say credit for the work they’ve done but Barthes says that where the work originated from isn’t what’s important, it’s the destination that matters. If we were to require Barthes statement that authors aren't creating new material merely meshing bits and pieces from previous writings together, then for the author to take credit of the piece would essentially be plagiarism, as they might be taking credit for thoughts that weren't theirs. Putting their names on books could qualify for property theft also, consistent with Barthes. Unless, of course, the author isn't seeking to require credit for the story itself but instead wants to require credit for the order during which the words are put together to make the story. So maybe the author isn't dead in the least. After all, if the author was completely dead then there would be no names on the covers of books. Not only would they not be allowed to require credit for a story that has already been told but they might not be allowed to affect the reader’s interpretation of their story. 74 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Even though Barthes thinks that knowing the Authors background would be detrimental to the readers interpretation of the text we wonder if the general public would really wish to understand nothing about the author whose book they're reading. Is it possible that reading the book without the name or basic information of the author might be like watching a movie without knowing what the rating or the plot summary of the movie is? To what extent is it right to broaden the readers horizons? Some people prefer to live highly sheltered lives, only reading certain things or watching specific television shows. Anything that doesn’t fall into their approved comfort categories is often completely ignored. So, if we were to require the Authors name off of books, would going into a bookstore be like playing a game of Russian roulette for them? Not knowing the author means not knowing if there could also be any hidden surprises within the book. So apart from the Author’s objections to not getting credit for his or her work, would the readers object?during this way the Author isn’t dead, for his or her reputation still affects the reader’s choice and open mindedness to the book. So, there might be as alternative ways of reading and interpreting a text as there are variety of readers. Barthes states at the top of the essay and rightly in order that he's more curious about proclaiming the ‘birth of the reader’ than the death of the author. Barthes essay lays the foundation and inspiration for various theories like post-modernism and reader-response theory. 3.4 SUMMARY  The Death of the Author” is an essay written in 1967 by French critic and philosopher Roland Barthes.  It's a highly influential and provocative essay (in terms of the varied claims it's making) and makes various significant development and changes within the field of literary criticism.  His theory has given birth to a very different understanding of the way we perceive Literature.  Death of the AUTHOR makes us believe that Death of the Author is must to ensure birth of the reader.  According to Barthes the reader holds more value than the author himself.  Foundation of the theories like post modernism and reader response theory are the by- products of this essay. 75 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

3.5 KEYWORDS  Antiautobiography:anti-biography (plural antibiographies) The history of the unsavoury aspects of a person's life.  Bourgeoisie :Bourgeoisie is a polysemous French term that can mean: a sociologically defined social class, especially in contemporary times, referring to people with a certain cultural and financial capital belonging  Elucidate: Explian something  Elemental :is a mythic being that is described in occult and alchemical works from around the time of the European Renaissance  Subjectivity: the quality of being based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions. 3.6 LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. Ask the students to research on works of Ronald Barthes. __________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ 3.7UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions Short Questions 1. Which disease was Barthe’s suffering from? 2. The essay “The Death of the Author” begins with the interpretation of which famous storywriter? 3. What does Barthes argue in the essay “The Death of the Author”? 4. Whom does Barthes give excessive importance to in traditional literary and critical theory? 5. As per Barthes what is more important- where the work originated from or the destination? 76 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Long Questions 1. Critically examine the summary of Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author.” 2. Discuss Barthes’ views about the Author in his essay “The Death of the Author.” 3 How does Barthes imagine the relationship between the author and the literary work? 4. How does his vision differ from past understandings of this relationship? B. Multiple Choice Questions 1. Roland Barthes was born in a. 1913 b. 1915 c. 1917 d. 1919 2. Death of Author was published in a. 1968 b. 1969 c. 1970 d. 1967 3 Barthes served as a visiting Professor at a. University of Oxford b. University of Cambridge c. University of California d. University of Geneva 77 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

4 The death of author makes the birth of the a. Critic b. Writing c. Reader d. None of These 5 Barthes died in a. 1979 b. 1980 c. 1981 d. 1982 Answers 1-b, 2-d, 3-b, 4-c, 5-b 3.8 REFERENCES Reference’s book  Peter Barry: Beginning Theory (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995).  Raman Selden: A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1985).  Ann Jefferson & David Robey, eds.: Modern Literary Theory (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1982).  Terry Eagleton: Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).  Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976).  Krishnaswamy et al.: Contemporary Literary Theory: A Student’s Companion (New Delhi: Macmillan, 2000). 78 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 Jonathan Culler: Barthes (Great Britain: Fontana, 1983). Website  https://www.britannica.com/art/Greek-literature  https://www.ancient.eu/Greek_Literature/  https://www.edutry.com/Study-material/  https://www.ancient.eu/aristotle/  https://www.iep.utm.edu/aris-poe/  https://www.britannica.com/topic/Poetics  http://ignou.ac.in/  https://www.uoc.ac.in/  http://www.tmv.edu.in/ 79 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT – 4: MICHEL FOUCAULT: AN INTRODUCTION Structure 4.0 Learning Objectives 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Major Works 4.2.1 Madness and civilization (1961) 4.2.2 The Birth of the Clinic (1963) 4.2.3 The Order of Things (1966) 4.2.4 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) 4.2.5 The History of Sexuality (1976) 4.3 Relationship between Power and Knowledge 4.4 Foucault and Ethics 4.5 Foucault and Feminism 4.6 Feminists in defence of Foucault 4.7 Summary 4.8 Keywords 4.9 Learning Activity 4.10 Unit End Questions 4.11 References 4.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, you will be able to:  Acquaint with the learning and thoughts of Michel Foucault  Analyse relationship between power and knowledge from the perspective of Michel 80 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Foucault.  Get familiarized with concept of politics.  Apprise importance of studying and understanding historical studies and social powers  Answer the examination-oriented questions Michel Foucault 4.1 INTRODUCTION Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a 20th century philosopher and historian. He was born in Poitiers, France. His father was a successful surgeon and his mother, daughter of the surgeon. He had two siblings, an older sister and a younger brother. Ceding to the tradition 81 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

in his family, Foucault as the eldest son was christened Paul, after his father and grandfather. Foucault hailed from an educated, affluent family that was also well connected. His father was a successful surgeon and his mother, daughter of the surgeon. Both his parents were ambitious for their children and not shy about using their connections to help their offspring—a fact that considerably eased Michel Foucault’s early years till he became established in his own right. Foucault did very well at studies through most of his school years. Foucault attended Lycée Henri-IV, one of the most competitive and demanding high schools in Paris. He recounted later in life a troubled relationship with his father, who bullied him for being “delinquent.” In 1946 he attained excellent results and was admitted to the elite ÉcoleNormaleSupérieure (ENS)school. This school created French intellectual, political, and scientific leaders. He was a very unpopular child at that time and spent most of the time alone. At ENS, Foucault studied under MerleauPonty, Althusser, and others. He received his licence de philosophie in 1948, the equivalent of a BA degree, a licence de psychologie in 1949, and cleared his aggregation de philosophie in 1952 after initially failing it in 1950. In the same year, Foucault did a brief teaching stint at the University of Lille, while getting a Diplome depsycho-pathologiefrom the Institut de Psychologie, Paris. Through Althusser’s support, Foucault also got an opportUnity to teach psychology at ENS and have, among others, Jacques Derrida attend his lectures. Foucault studied with Jean Hyppolite, an existentialist expert on Hegel and Marx who firmly believed that philosophy should be developed through a study of history; and, with Louis Althusser, whose structuralist theory left a strong mark on sociology and was greatly influential to Foucault. At ENS Foucault read widely in philosophy, studying the works of Hegel, Marx, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, and Gaston Bachelard. Althusser, steeped in the Marxist intellectual and political traditions, convinced his student to join the French Communist Party, but Foucault's experience of homophobia and incidences of anti-Semitism within it turned him off. Foucault also rejected the class-centric focus of Marx’s theory, and never identified as a Marxist. He completed his studies at the ENS in 1951 and then began a doctorate in the philosophy of psychology. From 1955 on, however, Foucault chose to undertake a series of foreign assignments—in 1955, first, as director of the Maison de France, University of Uppsala, then in 1958, at Warsaw, Poland, as a French cultural attaché and, in 1959, at the InstitutFrancais, Hamburg. He returned to France in 1960 to teach psychology in the philosophy department of Clerrmont-Ferrand. Foucault remained here till 1966. He frequently attempted suicide, due to which he was sent to the psychiatrist. Doctors 82 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

suggested that his suicidal tendencies emerged from the distress surrounding his homosexuality. Same-sex activity was socially prohibited in France at that time. Foucault took up the chair of philosophy at the University of Tunisia. In 1968 he returned to take charge of the Philosophy Department at a newly set-up university at Vincennes, Paris. While Foucault missed the student uprisings of 1968 for the most part, his radical stewardship at Vincennes stirred up quite a bit of controversy. By 1970, however, Foucault had secured election to the premier Collège de France, where he remained till his death as chair in the “History of Systems of Thought.” In college Foucault excelled academically, particularly in philosophy, history and literature. Before getting elected in 1969 to the prestigious College de France, where he was working as a Professor of the History of Systems of Thought, he was holding a series of positions at French university. He even lectured outside France and in 1983 he was teaching annually at the University of California at Berkeley. Foucault had a new approach to political questions. He was a revolutionary figure and was very active politically from 1970s. He was a founder of the Groupe d’ information sur les prisons. He even protested on behalf of marginalized groups. He had special sympathy for mad, homosexuals and prisoners. Foucault returned in 1978 with a series of lectures that followed logically from his 1976 ones, but show a distinct shift in conceptual vocabulary. Talk of “biopolitics” is almost absent. A new concept, “governmentality,” takes its place. The lecture series of 1978 and 1979, Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics, centre on this concept, despite the somewhat misleading title of the latter in this regard. Foucault defines governmentality in Security, Territory, Population as allowing for a complex form of “power which has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument” (pp. 107–8). The 1980s see a significant turn in Foucault’s work, both in terms of the discourses he attends to and the vocabulary he uses. Specifically, he focuses from now on mainly on Ancient texts from Greece and Rome, and prominently uses the concepts of “subjectivity” and “ethics.” None of these elements is entirely new to his work, but they assume novel prominence and combination at this point. Some stories depict him as an exceptional thinker and a major figure in every humanistic 83 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

discipline with immense posthumous fame (Smith 1972). Other stories see him as the tormented homosexual who attempted suicide at the EcoleNormale, but survived to lead a controversial life of remarkable intellectual success and limit experiences with drugs and sadomasochism; a spectacular journey that ended with an equally controversial death from AIDS (Eribon 1989). He became the first public figure in France to die from complications of the disease. It has been alleged that despite knowing his diagnosis Foucault continued to indulge in unprotected sex, thus exposing his partners to a potentially fatal infection (see Miller, 2000). It’s impossible to determine Foucault’s culpability with any certainty so many years after his death, especially when we also remember how little was known about AIDS at the time, even in the medical community. V. Y. Mudimbe (1992) points out, Foucault’s life and legacy contains many contradictions. “Foucault’s image today is generally one of an antiinstitutional militant. But this contradicts the whole of his career: all his positions abroad were made possible by powerful friends, and his election to the Collège of France was the result of politicking on the part of people who did not share the ideological opinions of Foucault the philosopher and the activist. At the time of his death, bureaucratic Parisian projects were underway to send him abroad (to Japan or the United States) as a cultural attaché.” However, “[b]eyond the play of contradictory images, one meets a philosopher, a ‘saint,’ simultaneously modest and ambitious, who was critical enough not to become a Jesuit and sincere enough not to play systematically by the game of the French bourgeoisie that was his own milieu” (Mudimbe, 1992, p. 127). Intellectually, Foucault attempted to break away from the phenomenological, existentialist, Marxist and structuralist thinking that dominated the French intellectual scene at the time. He looked, rather, to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Canguilhem and Bachelard, among others, to forge an alternative praxis. His work has enjoyed a wide cross-disciplinary readership and influence. Its value has variously been deemed to lie in the way in which it “successfully bridges the divides between structural and phenomenological approaches… or between structural and historical analyses… or between Marxist and critical theory” (Gane, 1986, p. 3). Foucault, on the other hand, has also come in for criticism. For instance, Perry Anderson is scathing in his assessment of Foucault’s impact on Marxist thinking (see Anderson, 1983). Habermas, Taylor, Rorty, Derrida, and some feminists have also been critical of various Foucauldian formulations. Foucault’s own summation of his body of work perceives “three axes” of genealogy at play: “First, a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to truth, through which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge; second, 84 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to a field of power through which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others; third, a historical ontology in relation to ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents” (Foucault, 2000b, p. 262). 4.2 MAJOR WORKS The books that he published were mostly histories of medical and social sciences. His passions were literary, psychology and politics. His thesis on the concept of ‘madness’ were accepted in France and he continued to write influential books on medicines, prisons, religion, power knowledge, sexuality and selfhood. 4.2.1 Madness and civilization (1961) Foucault completed his thesis on ‘Madness and Civilization’, which was a philosophical work based upon his studies into the history of medicine. It shows how societies have changed in their approach to illness from ancient times to present. It tells about how West European societies dealt with madness. According of Foucault there have been three major phases in the treatment of madness or insanity:  the Renaissance  the Classical Age  the Modern era Madness was seen as a form of wisdom and as people who reveal the distinction between what men are and what men pretend to be. Later in the 17th century insane people were segregated and kept separately from society by confining them with other anti-social people. By the end of the 18th century Modern era began. In this era medical institutions were created so that mentally insane people could be kept there under the supervision of medical doctors. Once in control, doctors then used the dual technologies of confinement and surveillance to reconstitute the confined as subjects of bio-power and objects of new knowledges called psychiatry and psychoanalysis (Connor 1982). 4.2.2 The Birth of the Clinic (1963) This book extends The History of Madness both chronologically and thematically. It presents a critique of modern clinical medicine. Foucault pursued historical researches and studied conventional historical events, institutional change, and the history of ideas. Foucault discusses the interplay between power and knowledge within the context of 85 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

biomedicine (Foucault 1988a, Midelfort 1995). 4.2.3 The Order of Things (1966) This book was a bestseller and made Foucault famous. This book was an expansion of the earlier critical histories of psychiatry and clinical medicine into other modern disciplines such as economics, biology, and philology. According to Foucault every historical period has its own way of thinking which determines what is truth and what is acceptable discourse about a subject. According to Foucault ‘man’ became an object of knowledge in sociology, through an archaeological approach which analyzed the different ways in which selfhood has been conceptualized along history; while in the History of Sexuality he delved into how subjects constitute themselves (Foucault 1995 and 2005). The subject is neither dead nor alive, it is historically constituted. 4.2.4 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) This book has four main parts: prison, torture, punishment and discipline. He has also discussed about ‘sovereign power’, which works essentially by violence. Earlier in France there was a custom, if anyone attempted to kill the King, which was the most heinous of crimes in a political system, the most severe punishment was meted out: the culprit was publicly tortured to death. This book is a study of gentler way of imprisoning criminals rather than killing or torturing them. Foucault researched the history of the prisons, how the prison system had come into being and what purpose it served in the broader social context. It was said that prisons are there to reduce crime by punishing and rehabilitating inmates but Foucault said that better psychological management of rehabilitation is required. All disciplinary institutions produce a “soul” on the basis of the body, in order to imprison the body. He says that schools, factories, hospitals are the modern prison. Like the prison, they all have educational, economically productive, and medical aspects to them. Foucault says that we are living in a disciplinary society, of which the prison is merely a potent example. 4.2.5 The History of Sexuality (1976) This is a four-volume study of sexuality in the Western world, in which the author examines the emergence of \"sexuality\" as a discursive object and separate sphere of life. Sexuality, and the open discussion of sex, was socially repressed before 20th century. Modern society continues to struggle with the legacy of 19th-century sexual repression. Instead of living under the imposition of silence, modernity has seen new ways of thinking and talking about 86 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

sex. In the second volume he notes that desire to talk on sex was codified using authorized vocabulary where one could talk about it, when one could talk about it, and with whom. In third volume, Foucault explores the development of the scientific study of sex. The concept of confession became more widespread, entering into the relationship between parent and child, patient and psychiatrist and student and educator. According to Foucault, in the 19th century, the \"truth\" of sexuality was being readily explored both through confession and scientific enquiry. Foucault argues that we have become not only a society obsessed with discovering the truth about sex, but a society that has come to see sex as the ultimate truth to be discovered. For Foucault modern control of sexuality was similar to modern control of criminality by making sex an object of scientific disciplines. This offers knowledge and power of other objects. Foucault discusses about biopower at the end of The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. Bourgeois class, who were obsessed with physical and reproductive health and their own pleasure produced sexuality positively, though it would have been imposed on women and children within that class quite regardless of their wishes. 4.3 RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POWER AND KNOWLEDGE For Foucault power and knowledge were not two independent structures but inextricably related. Foucault’s work heavily depends on the analysis of power and knowledge through which human beings are transformed into the subject. In Foucault’s essay ‘Prison Talk’ his theories mark the relationship between power and knowledge and states that “it is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power” (Foucault 1980a, p52). One of his ideas was that power is exercised and not owned by anyone. Power and knowledge not only restrain us from what we can do but also opens up new ways of thinking about ourselves. His theories are now used as rules and regulations through many societal institutions. Early studies by Foucault are devoted to the \"archaeology of knowledge.\" He was able to do so by looking back at the origins of \"discursive formations\" and the epistemes that gave rise to them. However, Foucault’s most influential as well contentious articulations have been about power. Around the time of Discipline and Punish (1979) and after, Foucault began to develop a more sustained enquiry into the nature and modes of power and its imbrications with knowledge and truth. As a result, a unique in-depth analysis of power emerged, as well as an influential rewriting of its relationship with knowledge. 87 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

The prevalent discourse on power in the Humanities, according to Foucault, reveals significant lacuna and misrepresentation. “Mechanisms of power in general have never been much studied by history. • History has studied those who held power—anecdotal histories of kings and generals. • Contrasted with this there has been the history of economic processes and infrastructures. • Again, distinct from this, we have had histories of institutions, of what has been viewed as a superstructural level in relation to the economy. But power in its strategies, at once general and detailed, and its mechanisms, has never been studied” (Foucault, 1980c, p. 51). It has been a tradition for humanism to assume that once someone gains power he ceases to know. Power makes men mad, and those who govern are blind; only those who keep their distance from power, who are in no way implicated in tyranny, shut up in their Cartesian poele, their room, their meditations, only they can discover the truth (Foucault, 1980c, p. 51). The dichotomous reading of power and knowledge/truth has been a salient Michel Foucault feature of Western scholarship, which, Foucault asserts, needs to be interrogated: [T]he great myth according to which truth never belongs to political power…. needs to be dispelled. It is this myth which Nietzsche began to demolish by showing, in the numerous texts already cited, that, behind all knowledge (savoir), behind all attainment of knowledge (connaissance), what is involved is a struggle for power. Political power is not absent from knowledge, it is woven together with it. (Foucault, 1994c, p. 32) According to Foucault, traditionally power has been analysed through two schemas:  the economistic “contract—oppression schema,” and  the domination—repression or war—repression schema (Foucault, 1980e, p. 92). The former is based on the idea that political power follows a legal and contractual model of exchange (Foucault, 1980e, p. 88). In such a model “power is taken to be a right, which one is able to possess like a commodity, and which can in consequence transfer or alienate…through a legal act.” In other words, “Power is that concrete power which every individual holds, and whose partial or total cession enables political power or sovereignty to be established” (Foucault, 1980e, p. 88). The second non-economist analyses of power combines two strands of thinking. Foucault calls the former Reich’s hypothesis. This hypothesis “argues that the mechanisms of power are those of repression.” The second one, 88 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

which he calls Nietzsche’s hypothesis, argues that the basis of the relationship of power lies in “the hostile engagement of forces” (Foucault, 1980e, p. 91). While drawing inspiration from Nietzsche, among others, Foucault sets about providing a necessary corrective to these prevalent misunderstandings of power in the Western world. Foucault’s single most significant intervention on power remains in radically rewriting this age-old script by emphasising the function of power as a positive force. The way Foucault puts it, “…power would be a fragile thing if its only function were to repress, ... If, on the contrary, power is strong, this is because…it produces effects at the level of desire— and also at the level of knowledge. Far from preventing knowledge, power produces it” (Foucault, 1980a, p.59). As for what is power itself, Foucault asserts that power qua power is a myth: “Power in the substantive sense, ‘le’ pouvoir, doesn’t exist…. In reality power means relations, a more or less organised, hierarchical, co-ordinated cluster of relations” (Foucault, 1980b, p. 199). In other words, “there is no such entity as power, with or without a capital letter: global, massive or diffused; concentrated or distributed. Power exists only as exercised by some on others, only when it is put into action, even though, of course, it is inscribed in a field of sparse available possibilities underpinned by permanent structures” (Foucault, 1994b, p. 340). His work marks a radical departure from previous modes of conceiving power and cannot be easily integrated with previous ideas, as power is diffuse rather than concentrated, embodied and enacted rather than possessed, discursive rather than purely coercive, and constitutes agents rather than being deployed by them’ (Gaventa 2003: 1). According to Foucault power is not to be confused with violence: “A relationship of violence acts upon a body or upon things; it forces, it bends, it breaks, it destroys or it closes of all possibilities.” On the other hand, a power relationship requires that over which power is exercised be “recognized and maintained to the very end as a subject who acts.” Also, far from shutting off options, a power relationship enables “a whole field of responses, reactions, results and possible inventions” (Foucault, 1994b, p. 340) to remain in play. Foucault also emphasized the necessary and inextricable inter-articulation of power and knowledge/truth. He claims that “truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power ...Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power” (Foucault, 1980d, p. 131). Further defining his meaning, Foucault asserts that “‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which 89 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it” (Foucault, 1980d, p. 133). Foucault credits his understanding of power/knowledge to a distinctive methodology he adopted. According to Foucault, instead of asking what and why with regard to power, he concentrated on the how of power: “‘How is it exercised?’ and ‘What happens when individuals exert (as we say) power over others?’” (Foucault, 1994b, p. 337). The chief advantage of pursuing this trajectory of thought is that it does not a priori assume the object which it sets out to study. Rather, it is based on “the suspicion that power as such does not exist” (Foucault, 1994b, p. 336). In practical terms, Foucault argues that any effective study of power relations as it obtains at a given historical moment would clarify the following five key matters:  “The system of differentiations that permits one to act upon the actions of others…”;  “The types of objectives pursued by those who act upon the action of others…”;  The “instrumental modes” through which power is exercised;  The “forms of institutionalization” in evidence; and finally  “The degrees of rationalization” that mark the exercise and ambit of power (Foucault, 1994b, p. 344). Thus, Foucault studies the way in which power has been exercised at various times through Western history, all the while proclaiming why it is imperative to engage with the operations of power. Foucault attempts neither to naturalize the particular power relations that exist in a society, nor to make of power an unassailable core of society. Rather, through his analysis, he seeks to draw out the relations between power and freedom in the form of a political task (Foucault, 1994b, p. 343). Thus, one of the many significant insights to emerge from Foucault’s researches concerns the nature of power in the modern Western world. Despite thinking that we can act freely, we still opt for constraining our behaviour because we recognize what is expected of us and believe that our happiness lies in meeting these expectations (McLaughlin 1972). This explains how power operates as an anonymous force, inciting us to think and function in ways that make it difficult, even unthinkable, for us to do otherwise (Grosz 1990). But it also shows that power can act as a positive force because it enables us to exercise control over ourselves (Allen 2002). 90 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

4.4 FOUCAULT AND ETHICS Foucault's \"ethical turn\" can be traced from 1980 to his death a few years later. Although others have referred to it as a \"break\" from his earlier concerns, Foucault sees it as more of an evolution and elaboration of his earlier concerns than any radical rupture. There is a clear change of emphasis in Foucault's work between the earlier Foucault's focus on repressive power practises and the later Foucault's focus on self articulation, reality, and freedom practises. However, Foucault also claims he “has always been interested in the problem of the relationship between subject and truth…. What I wanted to try to show was how the subject constituted itself, in one specific form or another, as a mad or healthy subject, as a delinquent or non delinquent subject, through certain practices that were also games of truth, practices of power, and so on” (Foucault, 2000a, p. 289-90). This segment provides a synoptic overview of Foucault's later involvement with ethical issues. In his works The History of Sexuality volumes 2 and 3 or The Use of Pleasure (1992) and Care of the Self (1986), respectively, Foucault engages with ethics in the sense of Classical Greco- Roman sexuality. According to Foucault, in order to comprehend the modern conceptions of the human being as “a subject of a ‘sexuality,’ it was essential first to determine how for centuries, Western man had been brought to recognize himself as a subject of desire” (Foucault, 1992, p. 6). This line of inquiry led him to engage with the repeated evidence of the “problematization” of sexual conduct in Western history. The early sexual problems, according to Foucault, from classical antiquity to the beginning of Christianity, provided the first examples of “‘self-techniques'” (Foucault, 1992, p. 10) and ethical praxis. Most notably the impetus here was not any universalizing proscription. Rather, the sexual ethic focused on the areas where men had social licence to assert their rights, defining it as “the elaboration and stylization of an activity in the exercise of is powers and the practice of its liberties” (Foucault, 1992, p. 23). Overall, Foucault describes his endeavour in these texts and his later years in general to be writing “[t]he genealogy of the subject as a subject of ethical actions, or the genealogy of desire as an ethical problem” (Foucault, 2000b, p. 266). Foucault defines ethics as the “relations with oneself”; as “the government of the self by oneself…” (Foucault, 2000d, p. 88); as the “technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, 91 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

perfection or immortality” (Foucault, 2000e, p. 225). Foucault investigates ancient Greco- Roman and early Christian ethics chiefly through the range of practices comprehended by the dictum epimeleisthaisautouor “‘to take care of yourself,’ to take ‘care of the self,’ ‘to be concerned, to take care of yourself’” (Foucault, 2000e, p. 226). While clarifying that is not to say “ethics is synonymous with the care of the self,” he argues that “in antiquity, ethics as the conscious practice of freedom has revolved around this fundamental imperative” (Foucault, 2000a, p. 285). According to Foucault, the modern West is more familiar with the Delphic admonition “Know yourself.” However, knowing yourself in antiquity was impossible without taking care of oneself. Foucault demonstrates the various approaches to self-care in classical Greco-Roman and early Christian cultures. However, he meticulously notes the shifts and transitions that the meanings, acts, and activities that the treatment of the self portrays go through—from their Grecian manifestation to their Roman and Christian avatars. These continuities and discontinuities are monitored by Foucault in terms of the four dimensions that make up the ethical relationship with oneself. These are as follows: Ethical substance or the aspect or part of oneself that is concerned with ethical conduct, for instance, is it feelings, or desire or pleasure, etc. Mode of subjectification or “the way in which people are invited or incited to recognize their moral obligations” (Foucault, 2000b, p. 264), for example, is it God’s commandment, or rational law or natural order, etc. The means of self-transformation that are used to turn one into an ethical subject—is it exercising moderation, is it cleansing our desires, or actively using them, etc. Finally, telosor the ideal we aspire towards when we behave ethically— is it purity, immortality, harmony, freedom, self-mastery, etc. (Foucault, 2000b, p. 263-65). Foucault’s chief conclusions are two-fold. First, despite differences in ways of living these codes, “nearly the same restrictive, the same prohibitive code” exists among the Greek, Roman and early Christian societies (Foucault, 2000b, p. 254). Second, Foucault believes the difference can be attributed 151 to the fact that the pagan ethic’s focus was aesthetic: “it was a personal choice for a small elite. The reason for making this choice was the will to live a beautiful life…” (Foucault, 2000b, p. 254). In his final lectures, Foucault describes parrhesia (literally, \"telling all\"), or the practise of frank-speech, as a crucial component of self-care ethics. Describing the relationship 92 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

between ethics and freedom, Foucault is emphatic that “[f]reedom is the ontological condition of ethics” (Foucault, 2000a, p. 284). Parrhesiais necessarily ethical but not all free “speech activity” is parrhesia. Foucault distinguishes parrhesiafrom rhetoric, prophecy and sage’s wisdom and says, parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty. More specifically, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as an obligation to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness over persuasion, truth over falsehood or silence, the risk of death over life and security, criticism over flattery, and moral duty over self-interest and moral apathy. (Foucault, 1983, para.22) 4.5 FOUCAULT AND FEMINISM Although Foucault has worked and commented on sexuality but in any sustained fashion he has never directly engaged with the subject of women. Despite this, Foucault has ignited lot of interest among contemporary feminists. Quite apart from his writings on sexuality, Foucault’s delineations of power/knowledge and ethical subjectivity have drawn both praise and criticism from a wide variety of feminist thinkers. Feminist thinkers unconvinced by Foucault’s works have routinely voiced concerns and have asked various questions that can be broadly enumerated under the following heads:  Foucault’s rejection of norms and universalist imperatives—feminists ask what this means for any systematic analysis and evaluation.  Foucault’s questioning of the idea of a Unitary, stable subject an subjectivity— feminists ask what this means for agency.  Foucault’s articulation of power—feminists ask what it means for politics, resistance and transformation.  Foucault’s disregard of gender and the specific subjectivity of women even when focussing on sexuality—feminists ask what this means for them and their politics and concerns. 93 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

TorilMoi is not alone in thinking that “The price for giving in to his [Foucault’s] powerful discourse is nothing less than the depoliticisation of feminism” (Moi, 1985, p. 95). Some of these questions have been addressed by Foucault himself, especially in relation to power, which he claims is the result of a misunderstanding of his ideas. Feminists, among others, have said that Foucault's interpretation of power is totalizing and leaves little room for any meaningful recourse against it. As Foucault (2000a) explains, “in human relationships, whether they involve verbal communication such as we are engaged in at this moment, or amorous, institutional, or economic relationships, power is always present…. These power relations are mobile, they can be modified, they are not fixed once and for all.” Consequently, “in power relations there is necessarily the possibility of resistance because if there were no possibility of resistance (of violent resistance, flight, deception, strategies capable of reversing the situation), there would be no power relations at all. This being the general form, I refuse to reply to the question I am sometimes asked: ‘But if power is everywhere, there is no freedom.’” His answer: “if there are relations of power in every social field, this is because there is freedom everywhere” (Foucault, 2000a, p. 292). According to Foucault conditions of power and powerlessness are never absolutes. They are constantly open to being written and rewritten because they are only palpable in and as relationships. This, he claims, opens up a plethora of options for us rather than the limited set of options available to us when we assume power as monolithic, substantive, and absolute. Not everyone, however, is convinced by or heedful of these clarifications. Nancy Hartsock alleges that “Foucault reproduces in his work the situation of the colonizer who resists (and in so doing renders his work inadequate and even irrelevant to the needs of the colonized or the dominated)” (Hartsock, 1990, p. 166). She contends that for Foucault “Power is everywhere, and so ultimately nowhere” (Hartsock, 1990, p. 170). This makes it systematically and socially useless for marginalised and oppressed people who are better off constructing a politics based on their lived, “minority” experience. Monique Deveauxfeels that Foucault is not equal to the requirements of feminist politics which “take[s] the delineation of women’s oppression and the concrete transformation of society as central aims” (Deveaux, 1996, p. 212). She gives two reasons for this: one, that Foucault’s conceptualization of the subject tends to “erase women’s specific experiences of power” and two, the inability of this “model of power to account for, much less articulate processes of empowerment” (p. 212). Taking Foucault’s views that rape should be seen as 94 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

ordinary assault and only the physical violence involved should be penalised as illustrative, she offers four further points to undercore his theoretical inability to understand either feminist concerns or women’s realities. They are as follows:  he “falsely posits ‘free agents’ as a necessary feature of power”;  “his analysis does not consider women’s internal barriers to agency and choice, as with the example of shame”;  “it sets up a false dichotomy between power and violence, as illustrated by the continuum of anger and physical abuse experienced by a battered woman”; and  “it does not question the fact that in many societies, men’s freedom …is contingent upon women’s unfreedom… rather than on the presence of a freely maneuvering antagonist” (Deveaux, 1996, p. 225-26). Nancy Fraservoice reservations about Foucault’s rejection of humanism, asserting that he never offers a persuasive rationale for his thinking. In this context, she asks: “Supposing one abandons a foundationalist grounding of humanist values, then to what sort of nonfoundationalist justification can such values lay claim?” adding that Foucault never squarely faces this question (Fraser, 1996, 24). Instead, she observes that he tries to “displace it by insinuating that values can neither have nor require justification” (Fraser, 1996, p. 24). Thus, according to Fraser, Foucault did not produce “a satisfactory non- humanist political rhetoric” and asks, “whether Foucault’s rhetoric really does the job of distinguishing better from worse regimes of domination” (Fraser, 1996, p. 25). Fraser feels that, on closer scrutiny, Foucault fails to deliver because Foucault’s studies lack clear standards of evaluation. Consequently, his assessments are not necessary and convincing conclusions so much as an articulation of subjective inclinations. 4.6 FEMINISTS IN DEFENCE OF FOUCAULT Foucault is also not without more unequivocal and enthusiastic defenders. Judith Butler and her rendering of sex as performative in Gender Trouble (1990) is one of the more obvious examples of Foucault’s theoriesbeing used by feminists. 95 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Susan Bordoapplies Foucauldian notions of “docilebodies” (1989) being subjected to disciplinary controls and constructions inher study of anorexia nervosa and bulimia among women. Honi Fern Haber, meanwhile, claims that “Foucault’s writings on the bodyand power challenge us to fight back with our bodies, to find new ways ofmeaning our bodies, and hence new ways of understanding ourselves andshaping our culture” (Haber, 1996, p.139). One way for women to recodetraditional sex/gender inscriptions, Haber suggests is “with muscle” (p.139). Speaking of the phenomenon of female body-builders, she writes, “inconfusing accepted gender dichotomies, the body of the muscled womanproblematizes seeing in a way that calls attention to the culturalpresuppositions oppressing both men and women on an unconscious orideological level” (Haber, 1996, p. 142). Margaret A McLarensimilarly finds great value and utility in Foucault’s ideas about subjectivity, power, knowledge and the body. Inspired by Foucault’s theories, she suggests “that consciousness-raising can be viewed as a feminist practice of the self… promot[ing] both individual and collective transformation.” How is such a proposition supported by Foucauldian thought? According to McLaren “Foucault’s conception of social norms articulates an important mediating structure between individual identity and social, political, and legal institutions. This link between individual identity and social institutions means that self-transformation is not simply an individual personl goal, but must involve structural, social and political change. This overlap of the ethical and the political and the conception of the self as embodied and socially constituted are…important theoretical resources for contemporary feminism” (McLaren, 2002, p. 15-16). Jana Sawickibelieves that Foucault's contribution to feminism is important. On the one hand, she observes that Foucault's work and feminist issues are inextricably linked: “Foucault’s analyses of the dimensions of disciplinary power exercised outside the confines of the political realm of the modern liberal state overlapped with those of feminists already engaged in the project of exploring the micropolitics of ‘private’ life” (Sawicki, 1996, p. 160). On the other, she argues that “his methods and cautionary tales have been useful and productive for feminist intellectuals struggling to combat dangerous trends within feminist theory and practice— feminist theorists who share neither his androcentrism nor his exclusive 159 focus on subjection.” According to Sawicki Foucault’s most important 96 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

contribution feminism is that ultimately he “asks us to reconsider the value of the emancipatory practices and theories that have been handed down to us through Western capitalist patriarchal traditions. Thus, his work fuels self-critical impulses within feminism that are indispensable” (Sawicki, 1996, p. 176-77). Clearly, Foucault's work has had a significant influence on feminist thought: the diversity of responses reflects the many ways in which Foucault has provoked and inspired feminist participation. In the end, it might be sufficient to read Foucault with his own admonition in mind: “My point is not that everthing is bad, but that everything is dangerous” (Foucault, 2000b, p. 256). To put it another way, while a vital, locally rooted appropriation and use of Foucault is unquestionably important, a mindless, locally ill-informed imitation of Foucault is not only questionable but potentially harmful! 4.7 SUMMARY  It shows how societies have changed in their approach to illness from ancient times to present.  Foucault has talked about prison, torture, punishment and discipline.  During 1960s Foucault used the term ‘Archaeology’ to describe his approach to writing history. It is about examining the discursive traces and orders left by the past in order to write a ‘history of the present’. It is about looking at history as a way of understanding the processes that have led to what we are today.  Foucault argues that biopower is a technology which appeared in the late eighteenth century for managing populations. It incorporates certain aspects of disciplinary power. If disciplinary power is about training the actions of bodies, biopower is about managing the births, deaths, reproduction and illnesses of a population.  His theories mark the relationship between power and knowledge.  Foucault’s work on ethics becomes the basis also of a new politics for him based on a parrhesiainspired critical function.  Disapproving as well approving feminist responses that Foucault’s work on power, truth, subjectivity and ethics. 97 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

4.8 KEYWORDS  Acquaint – make someone aware of or familiar with  Discursive formations - large body of statements or texts hierarchically ordered by particular sets of protocols and procedures of production  Epistemes - underlying, unconscious conditions of possibility for knowledge production at any given time  Chronologically – in a way that follows the order in which events or records occurred  Sovereign – a supreme ruler  Epimeleisthaisautou -to take care of yourself 4.9 LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. Students should collect details on various works of Michel Foucault. __________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ 4.10 UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions Short Questions 1. Name one of his famous book that was published in 1961. 2. Foucault was born in which city? 3. Foucault has explained relationship between which two things? 4. What is the subtitle of the book Discipline and Punish? 5. What is parrhesia? 6. Michel Foucault died because of which reason? Long Questions 1. Why does Foucault call Discipline and Punish a history of the modern soul? 2. Name three major phases in the treatment of madness or insanity and explain. 3. What is the relation between knowledge and power? 98 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

4. Summarize the book History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault. 5. How are freedom and ethics related? 6. What are some of the shortcomings of Foucault’s theorisation of power according to Monique Deveaux? 7. Explain biopower in detail. 8. In what ways do some of the defenders find his theories useful for examining power from a feminist perspective? B. Multiple Choice Questions 1. Michael Foucault was born in a. 1928 b. 1926 c. 1935 d. 1924 2. Foucault suffered from 99 a. Cancer b. Brain tumor c. AIDS d. Asthma 3. The Order of Things was published in a. 1966 b. 1967 c. 1961 d. 1964 4. Name one of his famous book that was published in 1961. a. The Birth of the Clinic b. Discipline and Punish c. The History of Sexuality CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

d. Madness and civilization 5. In which year was Foucault admitted to ÉcoleNormaleSupérieureschool? a. 1945 b. 1946 c. 1940 d. 1952 6. Foucault has explained relationship between _____________ and knowledge. a. science b. psychology c. power d. sexuality 7. According to Foucault ______________ power works essentially by violence. a. political b. social c. sovereign d. None of these 8. Which word is used by Foucault for his approach towards writing history through examining the discursive traces and orders left by the past? a. Archaeology b. Aged c. Antique d. None of these 9. What is the subtitle of Discipline and Punish? 100 a. The Birth of the Power b. The Birth of the Girl CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)