Conflicts and betrayals in a panoptic world as a Foucauldian power in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross and Joe Orton's The Good and Faithful Servant

The Panopticon is a design for a prison that aimed to gain control over inmates by its sheer architecture, designed by 18th century architect and thinker Jeremy Bentham. Foucault took this architectural idea and applied it as a social and cultural idea, enabling that the panopticist structure can be used in other concepts as well. Thus this study has aimed to search for the idea of panopticism in literary texts. American playwright and screenplay writer David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross and British playwright Joe Orton's The Good and Faithful Servant were analysed for this purpose. Although these two plays take place in different cultures and 20 years apart, we still see the same idea of panopticism, representing the capitalistic social system that indirectly forces individuals to appease their personalities in order to comply with the company. This thesis will thus take a closer look at the different perspectives these writers propose to the same issue, due to differences in setting, under a panopticist light. This will of course require analysing Foucault's idea of panopticism and how his idea and the writers' point of views are different on it. Keywords: Joe Orton, David Mamet, Foucault, Panopticism, Power