|
Abstract
|
Post-Modernism has begun after modernism. In the post-modern period, the post-structuralists have been interested in many fields such as sociology, anthropology, and linguistics, etc. Michel Foucault, who is one of the French post-structuralists, published his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison in 1975. In this work, he analyses the social mechanisms and defines the theory of Panopticism, which was first put forward by Jeremy Bentham. The term of Panopticism can be explained as a feeling of being followed by an invisible eye metaphorically confining people and oppressing them due to the continuous observation, discipline and punishment that it brings about. Therefore, an individual has to be under control as if s/he were always watched. The Book Thief, which was published in 2013 by Australian author Markus Zusak, is a bildungsroman novel. The novel is based on the experiences of a young girl, Liesel Meminger in Nazi Germany during the WWII. In the story “Death” is personified as a tangible thing, and the novel attempts to provides a fresh viewpoint of the world of the victims of the Holocaust. In this novel, Zusak portrays an oppressive system under the Nazis which controls people through their hidden agents. This research will shed light on the similarities between Foucault’s theories of Discipline and Punish, Political Panopticon, and Power-knowledge, which were introduced and discussed in his Discipline and Punish and Power/Knowledge, and Markus Zusak bildungsroman novel The Book Thief by revealing Markus Zusak’s criticism on how surveillance and people’s deprivation of acquiring knowledge is applied through oppressive regimes to keep the masses under control.
Keywords: Bildungsroman, Discipline, Education, Knowledge, Panopticon, Power, Punish, Resistance, The Third Reich, World War II
|