Foucault

Sadly enough my Foucault paper was a little dissapointing. Instead of bein a traditional paper, it was broken up into sections. I did have fun doing the research, but it was really hard to categorize him for the different sections of my paper. For example, I had to figure out whether he was an idealist, realist, exisitentialist, or perennialist. It was hard to pinpoint because as a post-modernist, he refused to be labeled. Existentialism broke out after the war, and Nietszhe had a lot to do with existential thought- that is almost all of my proof that Foucault was an existentialist. Maybe if I had the time/capacity to read his works rather than a summary published by Cambridge, I woud have been better off.

Foucault's most interesting theory is about the truth of knowledge. He claims that there is no truth in knowledge and people who are in power deliberately say things in certain ways to make you believe what they want you to believe. He does not have any straight literary theory, but he does have a theory of an "author function" where when you read, you don't think about why the author wrote this text, you think about how the author is conveying the culture of his/her time.

I'll be writing more on Literary theory in the fall when I take a class on lit theory.