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Samuel Beckett's Discipline And Punish

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INTRODUCTION “…the eyes widen to a stare and begin to feast” - Samuel Beckett, Words and Music The disconnected Word, the pervasive Name of the Father, and the motionless Law all become manifest in the patriarchal gaze that, in the very terms that Foucault conjectures in his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, serves to reinforce absolute surveillance and discipline. According to Sigmund Freud, specular gaze is anal and obsessive, and conceals a sadistic will to power. This obsessive love for looking, which he calls Scopophilia, is essentially an active foray into the vicissitudes of erotic impulses. The subject of this study, Samuel Beckett has been accused by many feminist critics of reinforcing gender hierarchies by …show more content…

The woman is not only stratified into passive possibilities of the author’s permutative imagination but also takes on the status of a spectacle or what Sharon Willis has called “spectacular aestheticization” (Willis, Special Effects: Sexual and Social Difference in ‘Wild at Heart’ 276). The spectator or the listener (as in the case of Beckett’s radio plays) takes the woman actor as an event-in-process, anchored on the substratum of his masterly constructivism (or, so he would like to believe!). The woman, in the conception of the male audience, must be denied any access to the overall setup and the structural setup and the structural center of the full drama unfolding on the stage- the woman must not transgress her role; she must not aspire for knowledge on the core process of creation or its cultural execution. The truth, however, is that she is the embodiment of the enigma and the diegetic interference of prohibited …show more content…

As per Freund, “becoming immersed in a film detaches the viewer from it and that, as a result, the viewer comes to resemble a reflection in a mirror looking back at its facing admirer” (Freund, The Eye in the Object

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