Michel Foucault And Modern Literature

In this thesis, we study the "literature period" (1960 - 1970) among all Michel Foucault's works. We first review some French writers Foucault studied during that time. We then select three most important writers who had tremendous impact on Foucault - Marquis de Sade, Maurice Blanchot, and Raymond Roussel - in his literature critics, to clarify the relationship between Foucault and what he called "modern literature". In the meantime, we also provide a new perspective to study Foucault's works through literature. To Foucault, these three writers represent different aspects in his literature research. They are three the most influential components of "modern literature". From Sade, modern literature emerged; from Blanchot, we know what "the thought from outside" really means; from Roussel, the relationship proposed by Foucault between the subject (the author) and the language it invented is clearly demonstrated. After analyzing the Foucault's theory in detail, we return to the relationship between literature and reality. For Foucault, modern literature is a form of language that escapes from its daily function (representation, communication, signification), returns to its "original existence", opens a new "space" between the order of things, and eventually produces a new possibility of the whole field of obj'ect and experience. This possibility of literature lets us find some sort of "resistance" in the modern power relations that Foucault described.