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The Strategies of Individuality to Resist Authority: Foucauldian Study of Orwell’s 1984 and Antoon’s I’jaam
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To approach the problem of individual oppression with an international perspective drawing on Foucauldian concepts, this paper compares George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and the Iraqi Sinan Antoon’s I’jaam (2004), which was translated into English in 2007. Even though Orwell and Antoon come from dissimilar cultural backgrounds, religions and epochs, they have tackled the issue of individuals’ oppression through their oppressed characters in a strikingly similar way. Hence, by applying the theories of both the American School of Comparative Literature and Foucauldian concepts, the current study attempts to establish a relationship between the Western and Eastern ways of dealing with the issue of oppression as an international problem in authoritarian states. Orwell and Antoon’s historical background has been studied, which reveals the close connection with the texts. Accordingly, it is concluded that the authors’ socio - political contexts had a considerable effect on their writings. Orwell and Antoon have conveyed their own experiences through their fiction to create an intimate environment that, in turn, validates their stories. Additionally, another significant result that emerges from the current study is that Orwell and Antoon have adopted the same techniques to reveal the suppression of individuals through 1984 and I’jaam, which at the same time encourage resistance against suppression and struggle against the absolute power of totalitarianism in order to claim individuals’ right and to lead their revolution against dictatorships.

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