ABSTRACT
Here the individual is seen as constituted by power relations and not as simply that which is acted upon or oppressed by power.
Although not all of the readers of this book will be students of literary or cultural studies, these are perhaps the areas in which Foucault’s work has been most influential. It may therefore be asked why Foucault’s notion of discourse is important for literary and cultural studies, because although Foucault did analyse some literature, mainly in the form of reviews, literature was certainly not his primary concern, and in his theoretical work he does not produce textual analyses as such. In some ways, discourse as a term is most important for the questions it allows us to ask about literature and textuality in general. Literature has been variously designated by different theorists as a privileged site of critique or as an arbitrary set of conventions which we learn to read as literary, whereas as Macdonnell states:
The methods and concepts of recent study of discourse make possible an analysis of the discourses, in their relation to institutional practices, through which a division of texts has been marked out and ‘literature’ has been constituted as the object of a certain enshrinement.
