Abstract: Ireland’s experience of colonialism has evoked many literary scholars’ interests and positioned Irish studies among the most thought provoking fields of studies. Joyce’s novel gave us the opportunity to observe how a white Irish man confronted the phenomenon of colonialism. Therefore, this thesis was an attempt to examine the Irish society which was presented in the novel from a colonial perspective. To do so, the researcher traced the process of Stephen’s maturation in that specific context. Previous Joycean scholarly works were of great help, due to the impression they gave to and the information they provided for the researcher. At first, a brief historical background was provided to review the process of Irish colonialism from the beginning. It helped the researcher to understand more deeply the main character’s feeling for his country’s history. Then, the novel’s contextual clues were highlighted and categorized into different groups to pave the way for determining Stephen’s Irishness and his sense of belonging. It was clear that Stephen was disappointed with all his national possessions. He emotionally detached himself from the family or his ancestral root. He could not define Ireland as his secure national homeland; the fact that reminded us of Homi Bhabha’s idea of ‘uncanny’. That sense of uncanny or unhomely brought him a diasporic kind of life in his own country. Catholicism as the symbol of Irishness was another focus of the present research. After trying so much to love God, Stephen declared his renunciation of Catholicism to forsake another factor of his Irish identity. Loss of Irish language was another source of Stephen’s identity crisis. Bhabha’s notion of ‘mimicry’ justified Stephen’s problem with language and proved that the colonized exaggerated imitation led to the colonizer’s anxiety. Therefore, Stephen was introduced as a modern colonial subject whose life was full of ambivalence and uncertainty. By living in Ireland he had lost his identity and art was the only way to his personal resurrection. He could reintroduce himself to the world and remove the stereotypical Irish identity imposed on him. Therefore, he had to pass the nets of particularity to find and express his identity through universality. Finally, this thesis aimed at explaining Stephen’s challenges for rebelling against his Irishness and being the inhibitor of the universe. In regard to the notion of ‘universalism’, the present study’s purpose was fulfilled by justification of his self-imposed exile as an attempt at crossing the national borders and ignoring all the differences.

The present thesis has sought to provide a Marxist study of ‘alienation’, its causes and its symptoms in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Written during the US Dust Bowl Migration and The Great Depression of the 1930s, The Grapes of Wrath sets on the story of a farm family, the Joads, who are driven from their homeland, Oklahoma, and are obliged to travel to California as migrants to earn a living. The journey they are forced to take, and the calamities they undergo en route are imposed by the capitalistic modes of domination and production which culminate in the alienation of the family as a representative of the entire nation. In chapter two, the capitalistic modes of domination have been studied as ‘causes of alienation’ such as ‘accumulation of capital in few hands’, ‘wage labor’ and ‘increasing division of labor’ that result in spurring certain symptoms in the Joads and in the society they live in. At the individual level, these symptoms are studied in chapter three, under the title ‘self- estrangement’ suggested by Fromm, the most symptomatic of which is ‘powerlessness’ that is seen in Joads’ lack of control over their life forces. At the social level, these signs are explored in chapter four as the reflection of Lukacs’ ‘objective reification’ or ‘social alienation’. The most important characteristics of social alienation are ‘fragmentation’ and ‘greed’ that are tangible in the clash between the great owners and the tenant farmers as well as the force the Californians impose upon the migrants for more profit. Despite the existence of the phenomenon and its symptoms that Steinbeck portrays in his novel, there is a great hope for healing the alienated society and its freedom that both Steinbeck and the Marxists agree upon. Such a hope is believed to be the universal truth if unity of the society is guaranteed through recognition of the quality of ‘species-being’ as the true essence of man. This has been illustrated in the final tableau scene of the novel where Rose of Sharon gives her breast milk to the starved old man as a reaction against the alienated society.

Abstract:
Jhumpa Lahiri has provided the world of literature with a body of fiction to which any critic interested in issues of immigration can turn for consult and wisdom. Of utmost importance for writers of immigration stories is the issue of assimilation to the culture of one’s hostland. Furthermore, it is worthwhile to note that any act of assimilation bears an ideological overtone which manifests itself in between the lines of works of fiction. By the same token, Lahiri’s latest novel, The Lowland, is one from which such themes associated with issues of immigration surface: hybridity, assimilation, and the impact of alien ideology on immigrants. Considered in the context of the United States, assimilation can certainly be linked to the allure of the ideology innate in the discourse of the American Dream. As an ideology, it drags The Lowland’s characters to acculturate to particular codes of conduct in their hostland and leaves the characters disillusioned in certain cases. Consequently, disillusionment results in their retreat back into their native endeared values. In certain other instances, it turns personas into hyper-individualized subjects. In this regard and while in America, Subhash and Gauri can be taken as moving in opposite directions vis-à-vis their trajectories of cultural assimilation. Overassimilation and the inexorable pursuit of the dream of academic success turns Gauri into a lonely and disillusioned being whereas Subhash, struggles to maintain a proper position in-between the disparities of the two cultures and ultimately is narrated to adopt a transnational status late in his seventies. The couple's daughter, Bela, is narrated to adopt a nomadic lifestyle and roam the country only to return home at irregular intervals and for short periods of time. Bela's nomadism is the result of the trauma of abandonment in an early age. Her final homecoming and settling in a romantic relationship with Drew put an end to her wanderings. To conclude, all the characters are in their own ways subject to debilitating influences of the American Dream and illustrated in the throes of struggling to come to terms with their in-between situations; at the end, each is rewarded with their own unique kind of revelation from the disillusionment of their traumatic experiences. However, different interpretations can be made regarding each character's denouement in the narrative of The Lowland.
 

 Myth theory investigates the impact of myth in different types of cultural production on the audience. Besides, it aims to show the way audiences are engaged in myths and how their cultural identity (i.e. national identity in this study) is shaped by its impact. Drawing on theories of Joseph Campbell in this study, the functions of myth in epic poetry are investigated to explore the impacts of these functions in the context of postmodern condition. Postmodern condition, defined by Jean-François Lyotard, is incredulity towards metanarratives of the modern western philosophy. Myths as the sources of meaning (i.e. metanarratives) in epic poetry provide the reader with the narrative knowledge which is essential in the meaning of poetry. Moreover, in the light of postmodernism, the validity and legitimation of knowledge instilled in the audience by myth function is verified. Four main myths of two epic poems, Paradise Lost by John Milton and Shahnameh by Abulghasem Ferdowsi are explored in general in the light of postmodernism to investigate their metanarrative’s legitimacy and the way they function in the construction of meaning which subsequently results in the construction of identity. Conclusions are then drawn that explore the aftermath of epic poetry in the postmodern condition.

The major thrust in the present study has been in the area of Althusserian philosophy. As once its principal preoccupations, Althusserian method of analysis considers the way the states exert power through the Ideological and Repressive State Apparatuses. As a deviation from Vulgar Marxism’s emphasis on economic relationships, Althusserian and other Western Marxist methodologies are all predominantly concerned with the ways the states create and propagate ideological discourses in capitalistic societies. To deal with such an issue, Louis Althusser created such key terms as “Ideological State Apparatuses,” “Repressive State Apparatus,” “the epistemological break,” “overdetermination,” and “Interpellation” to propound and examine the ways through which the states reproduce their ideologies and make their submit to exploitation. In an influential argument, Althusser states that ideological discourses take individuals away from a true understanding of their situations, while scientific discourses, as practices by Marxian approaches, provide them with realistic understanding of their surroundings. With this background in mind, this thesis was undertaken to detect and discuss Althusserian elements of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) and ideological and scientific discourses in George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man and Major Barbara. Arguing that in both plays, family ISA, cultural ISA, and political ISA are at work in producing ideological discourses, they are confronted by representatives of scientific discourse who challenge and undermine them. All through, the clash between these two conflicting ideas is focused on and it will be shown that the winner in this clash is the scientific discourse which is advocated by Bernard Shaw himself.

Abstract:

The present study sought to provide a structural analysis of the Quranic Creation Story based on Gerard Genette’s model of narrative analysis. Genette considered discourse as an expansion of a verb form and as a verb is minimal form of a narrative, the narrative is an amplification of a statement and as a verb has three aspects of tense, mood and modality, he analyzes the narrative under these three subheadings. The present thesis suggests that the narratological studies of Quranic stories provide us with a series of strategies and approaches which can reveal the literary aspects of Quranic stories to its narratees. Narratology as a structural method can bring about a model and a functional framework for definition, classification, description, analysis and critical evaluation of Quranic stories in order to provide a more scientific and efficient ground for understanding Quran. The narrative text studied in this thesis includes the verses in the holy Quran arranged by their chronological order of revelation (Tanzil). The effacement of the Quran’s two narrators, their state of reliability and their focus of narration are discussed under the subheadings of narrator and focalization. The linearity of the events’ representation despite their inconsistency in the narrative text of the Creation Story, its rhythm and speed of narration and the repetitive mode of narrative representation are examined under tense’s sub-categories of order, duration and frequency.

 Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a science fictional, episodic novel which narrates the invasion, immigration, and settlement of Americans in planet Mars, as a new American frontier and their encounter with the native Martians as well as with the Martian Land. Originally published in 1950, the novel portrays the future colonization of Mars in terms of the past colonization of America. In addition to referencing complications of the United States’ colonial and immigrant history, Bradbury addresses contemporary issues of Americans as the world’s first post-colonial nation. The episodes are set on planet Mars and the United States between the years 1999-2026, ending with the extinction of the native Martian race and the destruction of the original Martian landscape where only a sparse population of humans struggle to live with their displacement and alienation. The novel has great potential for Postcolonial analysis due to its preoccupation with expansionism, frontier, immigration, race, and identity. The present study discusses such undercurrents of The Martian Chronicles by analyzing the significant three way relationship between the Martian land, the native Martians, and the human settlers. Bradbury’s extraterrestrial land of Mars is a symbolic space in which real and fictional geographies overlap. The encounter with the Martians or the alien “Other” is another defining component of the narrative. It serves as metaphorical representations of actual cultural encounters, describing processes of Othering, mimicry, and racial attitudes specifically in the U.S. past and present, allowing the voices of marginalized groups to be heard. The novel not only pictures the tragedy of the Martian land and natives, but also of the human settlers. Bradbury draws a nostalgic picture of the American nation’s immigrant heritage and how a nation united by neither race nor history also lacks a personal identification with a geographical locale as the embodiment of their nation’s identity.

Following the “spatial turn” of the last three decades in humanities and social sciences and the postmodernist integral “dominant”, the present thesis studies fictionality as an interdisciplinary problem
of the spatial referentiality of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The focusing component of postmodernism is ontological, which is distinguishable from the epistemological dominant of modernism. Calvino’s novel, as a postmodernist ontological fiction, narratively describes the space or fictional place of fifty-five cities that have complex ontological structures. Accordingly, it is argued that, the ways these ontological structures of the cities are conveyed and described are based on the integration of the deployed philosophical concepts and narrative structures of the text and the cities. For studying the established relationship between the speaker and reader of Invisible Cities, a pragmatic definition of fictionality is suggested based on this relationship that is adequately reflected in the genre of “fantastic” or hesitation of the projected world. Besides suggesting an interdisciplinary study of the ontological structure of this transaction, the ontological structures of the cities are further clarified according to the self-referentiality and extra-textual referentiality of the cities that respectively reside in terms of the logic of parallelism and the logic of ramification. Therefore, the extra-textual referentiality of space, in terms of its adherence to the logic of ramification, results in the direct relation of the cities as possible worlds to three kinds ofpostmodernist spaces including social spaces, heterotopian sites, and dystopian spaces. On the other hand, the self-referentiality of the space of the cities as fictional worlds denotes the logic of parallelism, and it is studied as the interactions between the ontological strategies and the vertical level of space that is comprised of topographic, chronotopic, and textual structures. In fact, the aim of the present research is to argue that the space of the fifty-five cities of Invisible Cities have distinctive ontological structures that necessitate an interdisciplinary clarification of the way they are conveyed and constructed.

 

This study intends to discuss the idea of alienation and search for identity of the protagonist of A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul. As a postcolonial novel, it deals with isolation, fragmentation and man’s quest for autonomy and identity in cross-cultural society. It is the closest novel to Naipaul since it has close biographical evidence of his life. Mr. Biswas loses his autonomy and selfhood in the socially stratified community of Trinidad. Trinidad has different social groups and classes with different world views and ideologies. The Marxist critics, such as Lukacs, believe that a society with different classes has different ideologies that cause conflicting social relations. Because of the different ideologies, there are conflicts between higher classes and the working class. A House for Mr. Biswas is a novel about the analysis of the social conflicts of the colonial Hindu society of Trinidad which is rotten by contradictions, myth and rituals. Mr Biswas is against all these rotten ideas which make him be alienated from other people and take his identity and autonomy. Marx believes that the work is external to the worker that is not part of his nature: and he, consequently, does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well-being. Seeman’s Normlessness is a condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or idea. His powerlessne is a sense brings the alienation of man from man and the degradation of man into commodities. Based on Marx’s and Seeman’s theory of alienation, Mr Biswas is separated from his family and society. The Tulsis who represent the higher class try to take control of the lower class and degrade their identity and selfhood. Mr. Biswas also experiences powerlessness and normlessness, two Melvin Seeman’s concepts of alienation. Due to too much pressure that the Tulsis and the unaccepted norms of society put on him, Mr. Biswas suffers from a high degree of mental problems that they label him mad. In spite of all the problems and hopelessness and failures, Mr. Biswas never gives up struggling for his lost identity. Relying on his capabilities and creativity, he owns the house that he longs for. This can be Naipaul’s suggestion for all the lower class to regain their lost identity.

The present study seeks to analyze the representation of different female characters and in particular Lucy Honeychurch in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View. Here the said novelistic female characters are studied in terms of two correlative areas of gender identity and gender power structure to depict the unequal representation of women in comparison to men in the mentioned novel. In so doing, it takes advantage of the ideas of social identity regarding the formation of individual’s identity in social context and that of feminist criticism regarding the evolution of gender as a social construct, to study the creation of gender identity. It also draws upon the theories of Marxist feminism about the interrelatedness of gender with social class and argues against the ideas which try to historicize the concept of patriarchy. Therefore, it analyzes the ideological impact of patriarchy on different female characters of the novel and the way the mentioned ideology regulates their perception of their own identity which in turn maintains them in their inferior status. Although the novel is written in the Edwardian period which coincides with the women liberation movement, Forster’s female characters still embrace a true Victorian mindset which revolves around the Victorian ideals of class conflict and proper codes of conduct. In so doing, the said novelistic female characters act in accordance with the demands of their social class while their actions are simultaneously monitored and regulated by the male dominance of their time. The female identity has undergone various modifications in response to the ideological demands of patriarchy which has been strengthened by the advent of capitalism. In A Room with a View, Lucy Honeychurch suffers from the state of undecidability which is depicted in her behavior. Therefore, she acts in accordance with the demands of her social class when she is surrounded by the members of aristocracy and in particular her fiancé, Cecil Vyse, while she turns her back on them the time she marries George Emerson who is a known socialist. Consequently, Lucy’s possession of a unitary identity is rejected for the dependency of her character on the verification of her male counterparts. At the same time, Marxist Feminists’ claim regarding the banishment of social inequality with the emergence of socialism is repudiated due to the dependency of patriarchal ideologies on the biological determinism which pre-dates the existence of state politics.

 Using psychonarratology, the reading processing and competence of the actual readers are here studied in terms of the textual elements of the narrative world of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. In light of the discourse comprehension considerations such as inference forms, referential representations, and memory processes, two aspects of narratology that is, the issue of events and plots and also the concept of narrator in Christie’s novel are thus investigated. The present study argues that narratives are usually processed by the readers as if they are negotiating with real conversational participants. Using the linguistic notions of conversational cooperation and conversational implicature, some hypotheses on the way the readers would process the literary narratives are also formulated. One main objective of the present study is to demonstrate the possibility of assimilating some viable empirical methods of the sciences into the literary studies so that a framework for autonomous literary–empirical studies can be provided. Furthermore, based on the works of a scholar named Schmidt, which would be referred to later on, this study offers an interdisciplinary methodological framework, in which the cognitive processing of the literary texts is in the focus of attention. The present study argues the actual reader considers the storyteller or the narrator as a real conversation participant projecting a speaking role on both the reader and narrator. To prove such a claim, first, the possible relationship between the narrator and the actual reader and also that between the narrator and the world or setting of the story would be investigated as an attempt to define narrative as a mix of story and narrator and the quality of all the narrative details such as characters, setting, events, etc. would be attributed to a narratorial agent. This study also claims that the true plot and events of a narrative are not textual feature or authorial property but in fact they are constructed by the reader who for doing so makes use of his or her own knowledge and experience. So, to analyze the plot and events of a narrative, it is impossible to exclude the reader and his cognitive process. The reader’s sympathy and interaction with the fictional agents like the narrator and narrative situation also contribute to the process of plot construction by the reader.

The present study seeks to provide a psychoanalytical interpretation of Doris Lessing’s novel The Grass is Singing based on Lacan’s theory of cognition which is called the three orders to analyze Mary’s (the protagonist) psychic life in order to show the factors that contributed to her psychological decline. Mary Turner is a member of the white colonial community, whose mental breakdown not only brought about an individual failure at the personal level but also at the social level which implies white colonial failure in a colonized region. As this failure is not merely a personal failure, the context of Rhodesian society is also taken into consideration in the light of postcolonial theories to present external elements that led to this failure. In such colonized society, the Turners failed to enact their part in the racial hierarchy. In fact, the discrepancy between the ideal they were supposed to enact and the reality of their failed performance demonstrated the false nature of the supposedly natural, inherent hierarchy. Moreover, the researcher goes on to analyze this failure through Critical Discourse Analysis, henceforth referred to as CDA, of the colonizer and the colonized and the master/slave hierarchy. By doing so, the research aims at examining how the linguistic and ideological features existing in such a hierarchy legitimate the exercise of power for the dominator (the white community) and subsequently subjugate the other( the black community). Then, theoretical perspective of CDA mainly based on Fairclough’s conception and a brief aspect of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics are discussed. In other words, through an analysis of Mary’s and Moses’ conversation the research shows that Mary’s mental breakdown is also a factor that causes her death not the mere Moses’ cruel act of murdering a white woman which the dominant ideology seeks to promote.

 This study intends to demonstrate how the rightness of historical moment can be influential in the reception
and popularity of a certain adapted work. Tolkien’s epic fantasy, The Lord of the Rings, was first published in
1954, but was not adapted into a Hollywood movie until almost forty years later when a global “War on
Terror” was declared. The world was experiencing a real-life ‘Good versus Evil’ battle and the time was right
for The Lord of the Rings – a film that tells the story of a quest on the side of Good ones to abolish
Darkness in the Middle Earth. Looking at the success of The Lord of the Rings’ adaptation in light of its
screening after the 9/11 attacks, provides one with an opportunity to study the ways in which the
psychological, socio-political and ideological make-up of a society can affect that society’s understanding and
reception of a certain film. In case of The Lord of the Rings, the significance of context is highly intensified
because the film itself features many war scenes and revolves around the theme of “war against Evil” and the
context is that of great social – and historical – change and unrest. Knowing that the post 9/11 cinema saw a
significant change in viewers’ taste of genre, this study intends to address the ways this change of attitude
could have been the result of the change in socio-political situation of the U.S. Among the most likely – and
logical – reasons for the sudden popularity of Fantasy films, ‘creation of parallel worlds’ and ‘resonating with
key historical events’ are addressed. The aforementioned subjects are specifically investigated in The Lord of
the Rings as one of the first two successful fantasy films after 9/11 – the other being Harry Potter. Issues such
as ‘vulnerable boundaries’, ‘faceless Other as Evil’, ‘famine’, ‘stereotyping East as Evil’, and the dichotomous
division of the world into ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ are only few issues addressed in this study as shared concerns of
the film with its contemporary era to demonstrate how this resemblance and resonation could have
been effective in the film’s success and fame.

 This thesis intends to analyze the nature of trauma and its consequences in Murakami’s Underground and After the Quake from Žižek’s perspective. Slavoj Žižek elaborates on the Freudian concept of trauma in Lacanian terms. By considering Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit, as it is usually translated ‘deferred action’, and elaborating on the Lacanian Real, Žižek redefines trauma in terms of three criteria. To him trauma is firstly the intrusion of the Real into the symbolic order and it does not exist prior to symbolization. Secondly, trauma gains its meaning in the symbolic order and acquires traumatic features only in retrospect. Thirdly, the subjective response to trauma ends into the birth of a new subject. Underground is a non-fictional work about the traumatic event of Tokyo subway gas attack in 1995. The first part of the book consists of Murakami’s interviews with the survivors. After the Quake is a collection of six short stories which are indirectly linked to the traumatic event of Kobe earthquake that struck in 1995. I arrange my study into two parts. In the first part, I discuss the Real and deferred action as the main features of the nature of trauma. In the second part, I talk about the effects of trauma by investigating the traumatic symptoms and birth of the new subject. Several characters in these books suffer from trauma and their inevitable traumatic experience finds meaning in their life only in retrospect and consequently transforms them into new different subjects. In this thesis, I will introduce Underground and After the Quake as examples for the application of Žižek’s concept of trauma and the post-traumatic subject.

Although migration is not a new phenomenon, it has been given much impetus by the recent political-economic conditions of the last decades. As a result, a great number of people have been experiencing dislocation in various parts of the world. This phenomenon has found a channel in literary works among immigrant authors such as Jhumpa Lahiri. This study focuses on her 2008 collection of short stories Unaccustomed Earth to examine how cultural dislocation affects identity formation of the immigrant characters in the United States. To this end, the researcher needed to draw on the critical fields that are most relevant to the issues of national and cultural identities, migration, and the appropriation of women by both Western and postcolonial projects. By examining Jhumpa Lahiri's work through the double lens of Postcolonial literary theory and transnational feminist studies, this study argues that the identities of Lahiri's immigrant characters are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through hybridity.

This study intends to apply Edward Said’s analyses to Orientalism to study the non-western racial misrepresentations in the TV series Lost. This study explores a certain regime of misrepresentations through analyzing a number of non-western characters to show that this Hollywood’s series, the way it tells the story of non-westerners, is in many ways an example of a particular form of Orientalism. Lost tries to misrepresent non-western races and emphasizes European superiority in comparison to any other races. In simple words, this TV series tries to divide the races into two parts on the basis of the concept of “them and us.”
This study clarifies that what the media produce is neither spontaneous nor completely free: news does not just happen, pictures and ideas do not merely spring from reality into our eyes and minds, and truth is not directly available. Therefore, the objective of this study is to clarify how Lost is a particular example of Orientalism which misrepresents Orientals and causes misinterpretations about the Orientals.
From the viewpoint of Orientalism, Lost tries to generalize the artificial characteristics associated with Orientals or non-westerners and create a certain inhuman image about them in Hollywood screen and in doing that perpetuate a demeaning image of them contributing in generating several cultural misconceptions about the Orientals. For example, the Arabs are defined as uncivilized people; and Islam is seen as religion of the terrorist.
 

Over the last few decades, the concepts of “tragedy” and “tragic hero” have received a growing attention in nearly every field of academic study of literary theory. Aristotle in Poetics, Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), and Arthur Miller in the brief article “Tragedy and the Common Man” have revived it with their innovative spirit of their age, others have added a new dimension to it, such as Strindberg’s psychological complexity and “illogicality of real conversation”, Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialist free choice, Eugene O’Neill’s use of masks, Bertolt Brecht’s “estrangement” effect and Antonin Artaud’s non-verbal aspects of performance. What is beyond dispute is the unavoidable distortion of tragic dramaturgy from its ancient motive of Aristotelian manifestation. The case of modern tragedy is no longer that of kings and clowns. What features the tragedy of modern man is neither fate nor hamartia, but his capability to evaluate himself justly, his free will to choose, in Sartre’s existentialist concept. Though the modern fallen tragic hero whose ancient grandeur has faded away is truly common, the inner psyche of his character incorporates so much awareness of reality and recognition for others that enable him to manifest himself as a real tragic hero. This study intends to follow the traces of this concept of tragedy through the investigation of the correlation between two dramatic pieces, one Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, the other Mahmud Dowlatabadi’s Tangna.

Almost at odds with every playwright of his age, Christopher Marlowe, the
bad boy of the Elizabethans, usually struggles to undermine the authority of any
one accepted institution at hand, be it political, religious, or social. In so doing,
his works take the form of a self-sufficient organism which tries to detach itself
from the ideological structures by which it is produced. In this respect, his plays
tend to move from being merely a place where the structures of power is revealed
as suggested by Stephan Greenblatt to a more moderate stance, promulgated by
Jonathan Dollimore, where it gives voice to dissent and desperately tries to find
some means to challenge and subvert the established order although at the same
time it is bound up in its all-present, limiting structures. Thus Dr. Faustus is an
interesting case among Marlowe’s other characters in that he is a sacrificial
malcontent who while trying to confront and subvert the dominant ideology, gives
voice to and finally is destroyed by it.