Foucault’s ‘Power Relations’ in Alan Ayckbourn’s This Is Where We Came In | ||
| بحوث | ||
| Article 3, Volume 1, Issue 4, April 2021, Pages 30-46 PDF (657.13 K) | ||
| Document Type: أوراق بحثیة أکادیمیة | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/buhuth.2021.71543.1093 | ||
| Authors | ||
| Marina Nashed* ; Reem El-Bardisy | ||
| Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Women for Arts, Science & Education, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt | ||
| Abstract | ||
| Power is most commonly defined as the ability to do something, or to act in a particular way. Yet, when the word “power” is uttered, what immediately comes to mind is domination, authority, constraint, repression, or control over someone’s behaviors or actions. For this reason, power has often been identified as a negative notion, i.e. a thing that only an individual, or a group, possess as an advantage over the rest of the community, using it as a means of accomplishing one’s goals and repressing the desires of the rest. This paper introduces power as a positive notion as illustrated by the French philosopher and critic Michel Foucault (1926-1984). It presents the key features of power in the analysis of the British modern dramatist Alan Ayckbourn’s play This Is Where We Came In (1990). It also examines closely the power relations among the characters of the play to prove their Foucauldian nature. Power is not a thing to be possessed, it is presented as positive relations that are spread everywhere in the society where all the individuals are free subjects acting on their own volition, whether conforming or resisting, yet without existing outside its network. In this study, the researcher addresses Foucault's perspective of power as presented in some of his works, specifically The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction (1978), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977 (1980). | ||
| Keywords | ||
| power; power relations; storyteller; story performer | ||
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