Literature and Domination

Employing the theoretical resources provided by cultural critics such as Adorno, Jameson, Althusser, and Foucault, M. Keith Booker examines the treatment of issues of power and domination in modern literature. Discussing texts such as Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Thomas Pynchon's V., and Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, Booker focuses on gender relations as a locus of struggles for power in human relations generally. He also pays special attention to the work of Samuel Beckett, reading the novels Watt and The Lost Ones to explore the issues of power and domination in an Irish cultural context. 
  

M. Keith Booker is associate professor of English at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of Techniques of Subversion in Modern Literature: Transgression, Abjection, and the Carnivalesque (UPF, 1991), numerous essays on literature and literary theory, and more than 100 scientific and technical articles.