Foucault’s Concepts of Self and Punish In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and J. G. Ballard’s High Rise

By Seyedmohsen Mousavifard, Ali Akbar Pooyan and Ali Ebrahimi

The individual has always been exposed to the challenges in social institutions. Michel Foucault is largely concerned with the relation between social structures and institutions and the individual and the effects of them on groups of people and the role that those people play in affirming or resisting those effects. The aim of this book is to analyze Foucault’s concepts of self and punish in J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9780359280360

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Foucault’s Concepts of Self and Punish In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and J. G. Ballard’s High Rise

Foucault’s Concepts of Self and Punish in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and J. G. Ballard's High Rise

Seyedmohsen Mousavifard

Ali Akbar Pooyan

Ali Ebrahimi

Copyright

PUBLISHED BY LULU PUBLISHING PLATFORM

Lulu Press, Inc.

Morrisville, North Carolina, United States

Copyright © 2018   Copyright © 2018  Seyedmohsen Mousavifard, Ali Akbar Pooyan and Ali Ebrahimi

All rights reserved. This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements; no part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover design and edition by Day System Research Center Experts;   Tel: [phone]

Publication Date: 2018

ISBN: 978-0-359-28036-0

All rights reserved.

Dedication

To

My Family

For their love at the long-time process of writing

Table of Contents

Contents

Preface

Chapter One: Introduction

General Overview

Highlights and Points

Limitations and Delimitations

Definition of Key Terms

Chapter Two: Literature Review

Literature Review

Chapter Three: Foucault’s Concepts of Self and Punish in Lord of the Flies

Introduction

William Golding: from Navy to School

Lord of the Flies: The Plot

Foucauldian Self and Punish in Lord of the Flies

Subjectivity and Self on the Island

Foucault’s Concept of Punish and the Boys

Chapter Four: Foucault’s Concepts of Self and Punish in J. G. Ballard’s High Rise

Introduction

J. G. Ballard; A Science Fiction Novelist

High Rise: The Vertical City

Foucauldian Self and Punish in  High Rise

High Rise, Sexuality and Foucault’s Concept of Self

High Rise; Laboratory of Modern Forms of Punish

Chapter Five: Conclusion

Summing up

Findings

Suggestions for Further Research

References

About the authors

Preface

The individual has always been exposed to the challenges in social institutions. Michel Foucault is largely concerned with the relation between social structures and institutions and the individual and the effects of them on groups of people and the role that those people play in affirming or resisting those effects. The aim of this study is to analyze Foucault’s concepts of self and punish in J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. High-Rise (1975) depicts Ballard’s preoccupation with how the modern High-rise pushes man to the point where he struggles for saving his subjectivity from continuous raid of disciplinary society. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) also represents the condition of the human, real-life violence and brutality of World War II and constrains within society. Both of the novels are analyzed based on Foucault’s conceptions of self and punish. This book shows that the procedures of power are at the basic level of the social order where it produces its own kinds of bodies that conform to its demands and needs. Foucault presents a history of changes that cause alterations in modes of thinking. Both of the novels depict characters that are willingly or unwillingly exposed to these circumstances and implicitly delineate the way they try to mold and recreate themselves in order to be fit in those structures and environment.

Mousavifard- 2018

Chapter One

Introduction

General Overview

How has the nature of human functioned in the society? In order to answer this question on must find the underlying relations which are at work and discover how the society operates. Self and punishment have always been important issues for the human beings. But how these work to lead man to his ends and destiny is the matter of significance. What this research scrutinizes is the way the concepts of punish and self drive man to different directions and to draw a distinction between the actual operation of them within a specific discipline at a particular moment.

J G Ballard’s High-Rise and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies are chosen as the cases of study for this research to scrutinize the context of the novels, and also the direction and formation of mentioned art works, and consequently the characters of the novels from Foucauldian point of view to observe how and according to what relations the human’s high-rise is carried by the will of lord of the flies, and to observe if the concepts presented by Foucault meets the doomed destiny for all the characters.

Both of the writers have experienced the life in exotic lands with vicissitudes of times of hostility and war and had been in some ways the victims of external forces and events. As a result the trace of these experiences could be clearly observed in there recurrent narratives. Their characters are also usually the individuals that are left alone in unknown places so that they have to deal with the environment and get used to it. On the other hand, Foucault, in his theories, is mainly concerned with the same issues and how they are nourished and how they oblige the individuals to nourish them.

Michel Foucault is one of the most important figures in critical theory. He was born in Poitiers, France in 1926. Most of his academic training was in philosophy, after his first degree he trained for a higher degree in psychology and a diploma in pathological psychology.

He completed his PhD on madness and reason and published it as Madness and Civilization in 1961. In the following year, he published a book on the work of the poet Raymond Roussel, and in 1963 he published The Birth of the Clinic. In 1966, he moved to Tunisia to teach, returning to France to become the head of philosophy at Vincennes University. In 1969 he published The Archaeology of Knowledge and in 1970 he became chair of the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France.

In 1975 he published Discipline and Punish and in 1976 be began the publication of the three-volume History of Sexuality; he died in 1984 (Michel Foucault 12-13). He has influenced a great deal of post-structuralist, feminist, post-modernist, post-Marxist and post-colonial theorizing.

The impact of his work has also been felt across a wide range of disciplinary fields, from sociology to English studies and history (Michel Foucault 1).

However, the nonconforming and challenging nature of Foucault’s theoretical work has caused that his ideas have not simply been agreed on. Instead, they have caused dynamic and productive hot debates.

His books Madness and Civilization (1967) and Discipline and Punish (1975), are historical analysis of social conditions; however his work is not only, for example, an analysis of the difference between madness and reason, but it is also an analysis of the way that we think about insanity and the level to which society regulates the distinction and keep that conceptual distinction in place (Michel Foucault 2).

The most interesting part of Foucault’s work is his skepticism, and this skepticism leads to a concern to think about subjects laterally; this often involves a reversal and a criticism of the common-sense knowledge.

So, for example, instead of accepting the view of common people about the insane to be incarcerated because of a fear that they might harm themselves or others, in Madness and Civilization (1967), Foucault focuses on the contribution that the notion of madness have done to in the improvement of reason.

In the fall of 1980, Michel Foucault gave several lectures at Dartmouth College, the University of California, Princeton University and New York University. In these lectures Foucault had a movement in his work from studying systems of power relations to studying the creation of ethical agency. Then he begins to complete the analysis of truth, power, and ethics. In these lectures he argues that what is significant for sexuality is that Christianity started a