Correcting for The Corrections: A Darwinian Critique of a Foucauldian Novel

In The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen creates fictional images of himself and his parents. Through those images, he gives fictive form to symbolic components of his own psyche and also constructs an ideological critique of late capitalism in the twentieth century. I encompass Franzen's Foucauldian perspective within the perspective of biocultural critique. After comparing biocultural and Foucauldian perspectives, I summarize the story line of the novel, give an overview of its thematic and tonal structure, and offer textual evidence supporting my chief interpretive contention-that the central organizing principle of the novel consists in Franzen's effort to invalidate a patriarchal conception of authority by depicting a patriarch, Alfred, from a Foucauldian perspective. In the concluding sections, I reflect on Franzen's conception of the author's role in society.