Type of Document	Thesis
Author	Kiely, Laura
URN	etd-04102008-125145
Title	Foucault and the Strategies of Resistance in the New Journalism of Capote, Wolfe, and Kovic
Degree	Master of Arts
Department	English, Department of
Advisory Committee	Advisor Name Title Ned Stuckey-French Committee Chair Barry Faulk Committee Member Leigh Edwards Committee Member
Keywords	Electric Kool Aid Acid Test Kovic Born on the Fourth of July counterculture group psychology panopticon 60s Freud Didion Wolfe In Cold Blood Capote Foucault
Date of Defense	2007-12-07
Availability	unrestricted
Abstract This thesis is a study of the ways in which Michel Foucault’s theoretical assumptions about power relations are manifested in the New Journalism of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July. Chapter one begins by delineating the many power relations operating within In Cold Blood. Capote’s groundbreaking nonfiction novel illustrates the complexity of the power struggle between Capote and his reader; Capote, Perry Smith, and Dick Hickock; and American culture and Perry, Dick, and the Clutters. This chapter includes a close reading of Foucault’s “The Subject and Power.” Chapter one finds instances where panopticism affects power relations. Chapter two contends that power and the creation of discourses of power are vital to the health of any group or society. A reading of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test reveals that power is ubiquitous — even in anti-authoritarian, antiestablishment groups like Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Wolfe’s text contends that the discourse of power can be healthy for a group or a society, so far as the source of truth is not someone like Ken Kesey. Throughout the text, Wolfe criticizes Kesey, the Pranksters, and the psychedelic drug movement. Chapter two finds that Wolfe’s book is essentially an exercise in meta-discourse: Wolfe promotes his own idea of truth while critiquing another. The final chapter in this study explores resistance in Ron Kovic’s memoir, Born on the Fourth of July. Where Kovic may lack the journalist credentials of Capote and Wolfe, he makes up for in passion and raw talent. His memoir delivers a personal, historical, and sociological account of one of the darkest aspects of American life during the 1960s and early 70s. Writing about his struggle to adjust to his new life as a paralyzed war veteran, Kovic chronicles his resistance against not only the Vietnam War, but also against established conventions of “normality.” Kovic is paradoxically trapped and then freed by his paralysis. He represents Foucault’s notion of a subject’s ethical possibility.
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