John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954): a Foucauldian Reading

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Date

2020

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

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Publisher

Université Mouloud Mammeri Tizi Ouzou

Abstract

This paper intends to study John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954) from a Foucauldian perspective, and throughout our inquiry, we shall refer to the three parts of the trilogy, namely The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1955) and The Return of the King (1955). Unlike the precedent social theorists who asserted that power can only be seen through the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, king-serf relation or the capitalist-proletariat one, Foucault came with a new definition to power and attributed it to every social group. Indeed, in order to study Tolkien’s trilogy from the previously stated perspective and to know to which extent Foucault’s ideas are present there, our dissertation will take into consideration power and the other terms that are related to it and which define and complete it; that is, discipline, surveillance, discourse and resistance. As far as our findings are concerned, using some of Michel Foucault’s theories of power that he presented in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (1980) and in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1991) to analyse The Lord of the Rings allowed us to deduce that this fantasy trilogy and accurately reflects Foucault’s ideas about the omnipresence of power relations and the other phenomena that derive from it, namely discipline, surveillance, discourse and resistance

Description

30cm ; 67p.

Keywords

The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien, Michel Foucault, power, discipline, surveillance, discourse, resistance.

Citation

Literature and Civilization