Abstract

The works of Michel Foucault and Theodor W. Adorno are notable for their forceful critiques of modern culture, as well as for their profound reinterpretations of Western literature. Indeed, these two thinkers share a great deal in terms of the methods and goals of their analyses. These affinities exist in spite of the fact that Foucault and Adorno come from different philosophical, literary and interpretive traditions. In short, a comparison of Foucault and Adorno puts in stark relief a comparison of the dynamics of post-structuralism and Frankfurt School Marxism. Further, such a comparison reveals the affinities as well as differences inherent in these modes of critique. ;I have attempted to outline the consequences for cultural and literary studies of each thinker's approach to the act of criticism. More specifically, I have emphasized the different notions of nature and history inherent in each thinker's oeuvre. In essence, Adorno adheres to a conception of nature which is fundamentally the consequence of an instrumental understanding, while Foucault emphasizes a much more haphazard, and far less Hegelian, understanding of nature as a product of non-intentional discursive and non-discursive practices. This fundamental difference in their otherwise strikingly similar work results in two conceptions of history that are, finally, at odds with one another. It is in their different conceptions of these two concepts--history and nature--that a tremendously fruitful area of cultural critique unfolds. It is such an arena that this dissertation attempts to characterize, and which culminates in a reinterpretation of Homer's Odyssey