Foucault and the Study of Literature

Bibliographic Data

ID4375604
AuthorsDieter Freundlieb (corresponding author)
Year1995
Volume16
Issue2
Pages301
Publication date1995-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePoetics Today (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0333-5372 • E-ISSN: 1527-5507
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1773331
OpenAlexW2324640090
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited4

In this essay I investigate systematically how relevant parts of Foucault's work might be brought to bear on issues in the study of literature. I approach Foucault's intellectual career as one with four phases: (1) an early archaeological phase, in which Foucault regarded literature as one of a number of counter-discourses partly associated with the experience of madness and opposed (as an Other) to an all-encompassing Reason; (2) a later archaeological phase, beginning in the late 1960s with the publication of The Archaeology of Knowledge, in which Foucault no longer saw literature as a counter-discourse but, like the associated discipline of literary criticism, as one of the many discourses governed by an anonymous set of rules; (3) a genealogical phase, when Foucault turned from the analysis of the rules governing discursive formations to the question of such formations as embodiments of ubiquitous power relations concerned with the production and formation of subjects; and (4) a phase in which Foucault returned to problems of selfformation and subject agency and considered the possibility of an aesthetics of existence. In a separate section, between the discussions of phase (1) and phase (2), I discuss Foucault's influential essay on authorship in relation to the parameters of phase (2). Finally, in a brief concluding section, I summarize my largely negative findings

Epistemology · Sociology · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

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