Power Relations

This paper aims to investigate the role of language as a form of political and social control, and a vehicle for power and domination in Shakespeare’s King Lear and Edward Bond’s Lear on parallel bases. Foucault’s famous statement which refers to power as present “everywhere, not because it embraces everything but because it comes from everywhere” clearly points to the always already presence of power. The issue of power has occupied a central position within his works. In fact, language can reflect truth as false and vice versa to sustain dominant group’s desires. Language can both reflect and affect our perception of the world indeed. In fact, King Lear and Lear are both stages for language game. The paper thus aims to focus on the way language plays a key role in King Lear and Lear as a vehicle for power and how language makes you powerful or how it throws you away to be a margin. The result shows that there is a dual relation between language and power, so that the voice of king is doomed to silence through the function of characters’ powerful language usage. In both plays, King is in the margin and language rules powerfully on socio-political relations. This paper has benefited from library documents and sources by use of a descriptive-analytical method.

Nineteenth-century Britain, also known as the Victorian Britain, was the age of prosperity, advancement, the dominance of the British Empire, liberality, and enhancements in diverse social grounds. Through the light of New Historicist approach, the present study comes to critically question the idealism of the Victorian era and particularly that of the 1880s. Through exploring George Bernard Shaw’s Widower’s House it is intended to provide an illuminating understanding of the different aspects of the Victorian England. Focusing on the works of literature, New Historicist critical stadnpoint brings about less subjective views towards the past and a clearer view of all incidents. The present study seeks to demonstrate that England, and more specifically London as the centre of the nineteenth-century world, was not the suggested paradise described in newspapers but rather a city in which poverty enslaved people and suffocated them in dreadful houses built around the city without having basic facilities. Sartorious in Widowers’ Houses , as a brutal slum landlord who keeps his tenants in such a dreadful condition, represents the owners of such indecent houses which have been rented to poor classes of society. This research lastly demonstrates the controversy of the state of the city suggested by authorities and the true state suggested by the author. 

This study pursues a study of radicalism in Hare’s most radical play, Fanshen, and in Foucault’s mode of radicalism within his theory of power relations. From a specific perspective, this study borrows from the new wave of reevaluating and reinterpreting Foucault, which is concerned with irrationalism in his mode of radicalism. This analysis helps us comprehend the changes in the social trends and the specific pattern of radicalism in both Hare and Foucault. What concerns this study gravely, is the absence of the other side of reality or possibility in Hare’s Fanshen and in Foucault’s claims on power relations. The aim of the study is to depict how adopting radicalism and revolution by Hare and Foucault results in the justification of malfunctioned experiments. Furthermore, the way political tendencies are manifested to the audience is proved to be a key factor in the analysis of British political theater and in the shaping of British society. Finally, it is found that a Foucauldian reading of Fanshen results in the recognition of Hare’s specific pattern of radicalism which is in line with Foucault’s.