Individual Subjection

As the masterpiece of Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio has always been of much critical interest to critics of twentieth century literature. However this kind of scholarly attention is somehow descending in the twenty-first century, largely due to the limitation of newer theoretical approaches to the book. The inverse relationship between Winesburg's enormous popularity in public and the descending critical attention now arouses much curiosity in the author of this thesis, prompting the initial impulse which finally results in the present dissertation.This thesis tries to interpret Winesburg, Ohio from a postmodernist perspective, pointing out that those characters, referred to by Anderson as grotesques in the book, could also be understood as subjected individuals, and that the social context delineated in Winesburg is in fact a dramatization of individual subjection in light of Foucault's writings of power forces and surveillance of the individual. Anderson's subjected individuals in Winesburg, Ohio are imprisoned by the confinement of the town and the prescriptive codes of society.The dissertation is composed of five parts. The first part"Introduction"gives a general introduction to Anderson, an overview of the critiques and reviews on Winesburg, Ohio and an account for the initial impulse to pry into the feasibility of a postmodernist reading of it on the part of the author of the present thesis. Chapter One mainly discusses the close relationship between the modern grotesque and the subjected individual, stating that Anderson's grotesques in Winesburg, Ohio are of no exception. Chapter Two illustrates town's influence on individuals in the process of subjecting an individual to the community in light of Foucauldian Panopticism, according to which constant surveillance and self-surveillance make the characters their own overseers. Chapter Three analyzes truth from Foucauldian perspective and interprets characters'process of subjection to prescriptive codes about respectability, marriage and sexuality derived from the truths maintained by society. Chapter Four"Conclusion"summarizes the main idea of this thesis, indicating that reader are...