A foucaultian reading of gustave flauberts madame bovary leo tolstoys anna karenina and thomas hardys tess of the durbervilles

Abstract

This dissertation is a Foucaultian reading of Gustave Flaubert s Madame newlineBovary, Tolstoy s Anna Karenina and Hardy s Tess of the d Urbervilles. The newlinedissertation focuses on the discourses that constructed the French, the Russian newlineand the British society of the nineteenth century. Foucault is a man of newlinephilosophies, theories, and controversies. Foucault s vast literary heritage his newlinebooks, articles, interviews and lectures, forming his oeuvre deals with newlinecountless topics from a wide range of themes including knowledge, power, newlineaesthetics and ethics. Foucault s thought has been applied to a wide variety of newlineacademic fields, including philosophy, sociology, political and literary studies newlineand even geography. newlineFoucault s theories of philosophy begins from resemblance to newline representation , thought to language , discourse to knowledge , power newlineto care of the self , moral to ethics madness to psychiatric power , newline Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth . In his theory of resemblance and newlinerepresentation , Foucault opposes the general conception that everybody is newline unique . He claims that every stroke, act or behavior of mankind that exists newlinetoday indeed existed from the beginning. The similarities and resemblances newlinehappened in history have been recorded but not all of them. There are certain newlineevents in the past which were deliberately omitted by the historians. newline