Browsing by Author "Ramish Nazir"

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    A foucauldian analysis of tyrannical technology in george orwell’s nineteen eighty-four and don delillo’s white noise
    (UMT Lahore, 2022) Ramish Nazir
    This study provides a Foucauldian critique on the ubiquitous surveillance of technology in George Orwell’s 1984 and Don DeLillo’s White Noise by perusing its tyrannical use and abuse. It aims to highlight the clandestine ways of the authoritative governments to rule, dominate and “discipline” people through technological or virtual surveillance. The research focuses on the critical aspects of Orwell’s and DeLillo’s novels that, in various ways, relate to the tyrannical manipulation of their characters through the ‘propagandized’ and exploitative use of technology in the form of telescreens and televisions respectively. By canvasing the postmodern dystopia and paranoia of Orwell’s and DeLillo’s characters, the study contributes to the literary scholarship by a parallel investigation of the technological hegemony and panoptic surveillance in 1984 and White Noise. It attempts to discover how the two novelists underscored the ‘contemporary’ human concerns by delineating the existential plague of their characters who have become victims of technological subjugation. Through a Foucauldian model of Panoptic Surveillance (PS), his philosophical notions of technologies of power (TP) and technologies of the self (TS), the research investigates how merely the ideological setups of governing authorities such as ‘totalitarianism’ in Orwell’s 1984 and ‘consumer-capitalism’ in DeLillo’s White Noise exercise power and a stupefacient influence on their characters. Since not much work has been previously done on DeLillo in light of Orwellian deliberations and vice versa, except for a very few critics like Alghamdi, hence, this study carries on the discussion by essentially focusing on their comparable dystopian narratives, finding commonalities in their themes and portrayals of the ‘dictating’ use of technology. Through Foucault’s analysis of the ‘panoptic’ regimes in 1984 and White Noise, it will, however, be found out how Orwell’s and DeLillo’s characters themselves became a reason of their ‘self subjugation’ by ‘self-regulating’ and ‘self-disciplining’ their bodies under the fear of an omniscient gaze; thereby, deducing how such covert surveillance strategies of the Nazir 2 governments and media add to the chaos, oppression, and existential miseries of the modern man.