This thesis is focused on the Foucauldian analysis of power in two of David Mamet¡¦s famous ¡§Business Trilogy¡¨ ¡V Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo. Most of Mamet¡¦s critics concentrate on the negative notion of power, i.e., exploitation and repression, while examining relations of power in the business worlds of these two plays. The primary concern of this study is to explore the positivity of exercises of power in human relationships in Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo and then illuminate the fact that Mamet¡¦s figures of businessmen¡¦s false employment of strategy of power thereupon leads them to fail their self-assertions. Foucauldian analytics of power thoroughly manifests the subtlety of operation of power as well as the productive effects of power in Mametian business world.
The introduction mentions the distinctiveness of Mamet¡¦s business plays and explains the connection between these two plays of Mamet and Foucauldian analytics of power. Chapter one deals with an overview of Foucault¡¦s conception of power, which provides a theoretical frame for the body of this study. In this chapter, not only the transformation and the skeleton of Foucauldian power are proffered, but the characteristics of juridical-discursive model of power are also introduced. Therefore, in the following two chapters, the reasons of employing Foucauldian analytics of power for this research are displayed in the process of analyzing exercises of power. The second chapter attempts to exam the power relations from a series of actions of betraying in Glengarry Glen Ross. It is shown that Mamet¡¦s businessmen, for the sake of survival, practice betrayals in the light of exercising resistance in relations of power. Chapter three is chiefly concerned with the conflicts and delicate exercises of power among the characters in American Buffalo. The three main characters¡¦ failure of distinguishing business from friendship causes the distortion of human relations in which material advantages are involved. Throughout the examination of power relations in these two plays of power, the last chapter concludes that David Mamet¡¦s aim of writing plays will be achieved if his readers become to be aware of the danger of wrongly adopting strategies of power in human communities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0802100-165217 |
| Date | 02 August 2000 |
| Creators | Chen, Wan-Ling |
| Contributors | Pen-shui Liao, I-Chun Wang, Hsin-fa Wu |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0802100-165217 |
| Rights | off_campus_withheld, Copyright information available at source archive |
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