Author: Jean Genet
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description

Author: Jean Genet
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Authors, French
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description

Author: Jean Genet
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description

Author: Gene A. Plunka
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838634615
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
"In this book, Gene A. Plunka argues that the most important single element that solidifies all of Genet's work is the concept of metamorphosis. Genet's plays and prose demonstrate the transition from game playing to the establishment of one's identity through a state of risk taking that develops from solitude. However, risk taking per se is not as important as the rite of passage. Anthropologist Victor Turner's work in ethnography is used as a focal point for the examination of rites of passage in Genet's dramas." "Rejecting society, Genet has allied himself with peripheral groups, marginal men, and outcasts--scapegoats who lack power in society. Much of their effort is spent in revolt or direct opposition in mainstream society that sees them as objects to be abused. As an outcast or marginal man, Genet solved his problem of identity through artistic creation and metamorphosis. Likewise, Genet's protagonists are outcasts searching for positive value in a society over which they have no control; they always appear to be the victims or scapegoats. As outcasts, Genet's protagonists establish their identities by first willing their actions and being proud to do so." "Unfortunately, man's sense of Being is constantly undermined by society and the way individuals react to roles, norms, and values. Roles are the products of carefully defined and codified years of positively sanctioned institutional behavior. According to Genet, role playing limits individual freedom, stifles creativity, and impedes differentiation. Genet equates role playing with stagnant bourgeois society that imitates rather than invents; the latter is a word Genet often uses to urge his protagonists into a state of productive metamorphosis. Imitation versus invention is the underlying dialectic between bourgeois society and outcasts that is omnipresent in virtually all of Genet's works." "Faced with rejection, poverty, oppression, and degradation, Genet's outcasts often escape their horrible predicaments by living in a world of illusion that consists of ceremony, game playing, narcissism, sexual and secret rites, or political charades. Like children, Genet's ostracized individuals play games to imitate a world that they can not enter. Essentially, the play acting becomes catharsis for an oppressed group that is otherwise confined to the lower stratum of society." "Role players and outcasts who try to find an identity through cathartic game playing never realize their potential in Genet's world. Instead, Genet is interested in outcasts who immerse themselves in solitude and create their own sense of dignity free from external control. Most important, these isolated individuals may initially play games, yet they ultimately experience metamorphosis from a world of rites, charades, and rituals to a type of "sainthood" where dignity and nobility reign. The apotheosis is achieved through a distinct act of conscious revolt designed to condemn the risk taker to a degraded life of solitude totally distinct from society's norms and values." --Book Jacket.

Author: Kadji Amin
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822372592
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Jean Genet (1910–1986) resonates, perhaps more than any other canonical queer figure from the pre-Stonewall past, with contemporary queer sensibilities attuned to a defiant non-normativity. Not only sexually queer, Genet was also a criminal and a social pariah, a bitter opponent of the police state, and an ally of revolutionary anticolonial movements. In Disturbing Attachments, Kadji Amin challenges the idealization of Genet as a paradigmatic figure within queer studies to illuminate the methodological dilemmas at the heart of queer theory. Pederasty, which was central to Genet's sexuality and to his passionate cross-racial and transnational political activism late in life, is among a series of problematic and outmoded queer attachments that Amin uses to deidealize and historicize queer theory. He brings the genealogy of Genet's imaginaries of attachment to bear on pressing issues within contemporary queer politics and scholarship, including prison abolition, homonationalism, and pinkwashing. Disturbing Attachments productively and provocatively unsettles queer studies by excavating the history of its affective tendencies to reveal and ultimately expand the contexts that inform the use and connotations of the term queer.

Author: Benjamin Suhl
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1583482784
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
This is the first survey and appraisal of the literary criticism written by Jean-Paul Sartre during the last thirty years. Benjamin Suhl relates Sartre's evolution as a systematic philosopher. For those not acquainted with all Sartre's critical writing during this period, the author includes descriptive presentation of the material, including recent article as yet unavailable in English.

Author: Jeffery P Dennis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351684345
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
The Myth of the Queer Criminal documents over a century of writings by sociologists, psychologists, criminologists, and forensic scientists, in Europe and the United States, who asserted that LGBT persons were innately and uniquely criminal. Applying the tools of narratology and queer theory, Jeffery P. Dennis examines the ten types of queer criminal that have appeared in seminal texts, both literary and scientific, over the past 140 years - beginning with Lombroso's Criminal Man (1876) and extending to postmodern criminologists and contemporary textbooks. Each type is named after its defining characteristic. The pederast, for example, was believed to be a master-criminal, leading vast criminal empires. The degenerate, intellectually and morally corrupted, was perceived as a symptom or cause of societal decay. The silly, lisping pansy was a figure of ridicule, rather than of dread. The traitor was murderous and depraved, prepared to destroy democratic institutions worldwide. The book aims to contextualize this mythology, revealing the motivations of the agents behind it, the influence of broader preoccupations and anxieties of the age, and its societal, political and cultural impact. This carefully researched, meticulously written history of the queer criminal will be of interest to students and researchers in criminology, gender studies, queer studies, and the history of sexuality.

Author: Bettina Liebowitz Knapp
Publisher: MacMillan Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Provides in-depth analysis of the life, works, career, and critical importance of Jean Genet.

Author: Herbert Gold
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351305867
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
In his first book of non-fiction, originally published in 1962, Herbert Gold explores some not-so-happy problems confronting people in an age of "mass destruction, mass inertia, mass everything." While acknowledging that we live in a time of utmost global significance-war on an enormous scale was a reality of the twentieth century and continues to threaten, unadulterated evil has exhibited itself in grandiose proportions-Gold tackles issues and problems which are very much of significance to the individual: teaching, writing, love, marriage, divorce, and death. In The Age of Happy Problems, Gold takes the reader through a journey of eclectic characters, situations, and locales. Part I is a selection of essays entitled "American Events." In "The Age of Happy Problems" we are presented with an analysis of the problems facing people in the middle of their lives and careers. "How to Be an Artist's Wife" explores the prospect of being married, and remaining married, to a temperamental and egotistical artist. "Divorce as a Moral Act" describes the termination of marriage as a means for renewal and the chance to start over again the search for love. "The Bachelor's Dilemma" evokes the decisions confronting the male of the "big city." And "A Dog in Brooklyn, A Girl in Detroit: A L"ife Among the Humanities" is a memoir on the paradoxes of teaching in a university. Part II is entitled "American Places." The author examines in this section various American lifestyles. In "Paris: Notes from La Vie de Boheme," Gold describes Americans abroad, why they decide to become expatriates, and how they adapt to their new surroundings. In "Greenwich Village: The Changing Village" he writes about the importance of New York City's symbol of change, experiment and nonconformity. Finally, the author meditates on "Death in Miami Beach," offering a moving account of the relationship between death and the popular Florida city. Gold writes: "How can I total it up? What is the map of the map? Well, to begin with, Plato was wrong. The life of contemplation is not sufficient...and for another thing, Plato was right. He knew that men must learn to come together in the practice of intelligence and moral privilege." Gold's essays, stemming from the author's own humanity, are just as poignant and relevant today as they were when they were first published. The Age of Happy Problems is sure to captivate, but perhaps most of all, make the reader contemplate the importance of these issues for his or her own life.

Author: Metka Zupanc̆ic̆
Publisher: Summa Publications, Inc.
ISBN: 9781883479473
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
This volume contains fourteen essays in which different aspects of gerard Bucher's "thanatopoietic hypothesis" are examined. Initially, five papers (by Wilson Baldridge, Claire Nouvet, Jean-Michel Rabate, Helene Domon and Metka Zupancic) were presented at the International Association for Philosophy and Literature (IAPL), during its 2001 meeting in Atlanta. Subsequently Michel Deguy and Pierre Ouellet, together with Christian Garaud, Kuisma Korhonen, Michael Degener, and Maurizio Godorecci, were invited to explore various implications of Bucher's hypothesis. Bucher's own work, as shown in his contribution to this volume, analyzes the connection between our experience of death and the establishment of poetry as a means of approaching the truth of being, of aestheticism, and of ethics.