Discourse and domination: How postmodern novels expose institutional power
Main Article Content
Abstract
Postmodern fiction is often described in aesthetic terms: irony, fragmentation, parody, and metafictional play. Yet its most durable political contribution may be its sustained attention to how institutions manufacture consent through language, narrative, and everyday routines. This article argues that many canonical postmodern novels function as laboratories for studying domination. They stage encounters between subjects and institutions (state, market, media, bureaucracy, patriarchy) and then destabilize the discursive mechanisms that make those institutions appear neutral or inevitable. Bringing together Foucauldian discourse theory, critical discourse analysis, and theories of hegemony and symbolic power, the article develops an operational framework for reading institutional domination in narrative. It then applies that framework comparatively to seven novels: Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow, Don DeLillo's White Noise, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and J. M. Coetzee's Foe, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. Across these texts, domination is exposed not only by what institutions do but by how they speak: through bureaucratic registers, risk and expertise discourse, propaganda, archival genres, and naming practices that position subjects. Postmodern formal devices such as paranoia plots, collage, historiographic metafiction, and self-reflexive framing are shown to operate as counter-discursive strategies, training readers to perceive the politics of language and the contingency of institutional truth-claims.
Downloads
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
This open-access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.
You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.
Under the following terms: Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
No additional restrictions You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
How to Cite
Share
References
Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation). In L. Althusser, Lenin and philosophy and other essays (B. Brewster, Trans.). Monthly Review Press. (Original work published 1970)
Atwood, M. (1985). The handmaid's tale. McClelland and Stewart.
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford University Press.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays (M. Holquist, Ed.; C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). University of Texas Press.
Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation (S. F. Glaser, Trans.). University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 1981)
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power (J. B. Thompson, Ed.; G. Raymond & M. Adamson, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Butler, J. (1997). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. Routledge.
Coetzee, J. M. (1986). Foe. Ravan Press.
Debord, G. (1994). The society of the spectacle (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Zone Books. (Original work published 1967)
DeLillo, D. (1985). White noise. Viking.
Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Polity Press.
Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1969)
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1975)
Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality, Volume 1: An introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1976)
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977 (C. Gordon, Ed.). Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777-795.
Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality (pp. 87-104). University of Chicago Press.
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. Nowell Smith, Eds. & Trans.). International Publishers.
Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Blackwell.
Hutcheon, L. (1988). A poetics of postmodernism: History, theory, fiction. Routledge.
Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism. Duke University Press.
Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge (G. Bennington & B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1979)
Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. Alfred A. Knopf.
Pynchon, T. (1966). The crying of Lot 49. J. B. Lippincott.
Pynchon, T. (1973). Gravity's rainbow. Viking.
Rushdie, S. (1981). Midnight's children. Jonathan Cape.
Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books.
Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271-313). University of Illinois Press.
Spivak, G. C. (1999). A critique of postcolonial reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present. Harvard University Press.
van Dijk, T. A. (1993). Principles of critical discourse analysis. Discourse & Society, 4(2), 249-283.
Wodak, R., & Meyer, M. (Eds.). (2001). Methods of critical discourse analysis. SAGE.