The Papin Sisters

The Papin Sisters PDF Author: Rachel Edwards
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191541699
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
The 1933 killing by the Papin sisters of their mistress and her daughter was an act of unexampled violence by women against women, whose repercussions have been felt in French culture ever since. It received wide journalistic coverage at the time, and subsequently prominent literary figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Genet have dealt with the case, which has also formed the basis of a stage play (by Wendy Kesselmann) and films by Nico Papatakis, Nancy Meckler and Claude Chabrol. The case casts fascinating light on French provincial life between the wars, the role of women (especially unmarried ones) in French society, and French views of the criminal outsider. Its impact on psychoanalytic discourse, through the work first of Jacques Lacan, then of Francis Dupré and Marie-Magdeleine Lessana, has also been considerable, notably in its contribution to the development of the key notion of the mirror-phase. The almost obsessive recurrence of the case makes of it a fascinating prism through which to examine multiple aspects of recent French culture.

The Papin Sisters

The Papin Sisters PDF Author: Rachel Edwards
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191541699
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 142

Get Book Here

Book Description
The 1933 killing by the Papin sisters of their mistress and her daughter was an act of unexampled violence by women against women, whose repercussions have been felt in French culture ever since. It received wide journalistic coverage at the time, and subsequently prominent literary figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Genet have dealt with the case, which has also formed the basis of a stage play (by Wendy Kesselmann) and films by Nico Papatakis, Nancy Meckler and Claude Chabrol. The case casts fascinating light on French provincial life between the wars, the role of women (especially unmarried ones) in French society, and French views of the criminal outsider. Its impact on psychoanalytic discourse, through the work first of Jacques Lacan, then of Francis Dupré and Marie-Magdeleine Lessana, has also been considerable, notably in its contribution to the development of the key notion of the mirror-phase. The almost obsessive recurrence of the case makes of it a fascinating prism through which to examine multiple aspects of recent French culture.

Maids

Maids PDF Author: Katie Skelly
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
ISBN: 1683963687
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
The scandalous true crime story about the Papin Sisters, as told by one of comics' most stylized talents. Christine Papin, an overworked live-in maid, is reunited with her younger sister, Lea, who has also been hired by the wealthy Lancelin family. They make the estate's beds, scrub the floors, and spy on the domestic strife that routinely occurs within its walls. What starts as petty theft by the maids ― who are flashing back to their tumultuous time in a convent ― shortly turns into something more nefarious. Madame Lancelin’s increasingly unhinged abuse ignites the sisters' toxic upbringing and social class exploitation and explodes into a ghastly double murder, an event that shocked and fascinated 1930s France and beyond. Maids has high bravura and high intrigue, all drawn in Skelly’s highly stylized manner, which combines the best of pop art, manga, and Eurocomics.

The Crimes of the Papin Sisters

The Crimes of the Papin Sisters PDF Author: Amy Delaney
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781546994596
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 38

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Book Description
Christine Papin and L�a Papin were two French maids who murdered their employer's wife and daughter in Le Mans, France, on 2 February 1933. The murders were a shock to the country and but some saw the maids as symbols of the underclass lashing out against the rich. The case has formed the basis of a number of films and plays. This is the story of how the two unassuming sisters became murderers.

My Sister in this House

My Sister in this House PDF Author: Wendy Ann Kesselman
Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
ISBN: 9780573618727
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
When two emotionally abused servant-sisters respond to their pent-up hostilities, brutal murder of their mistress is the result. Based on a historical incident in Le Mans, France in 1933.

Insane Passions

Insane Passions PDF Author: Christine Coffman
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 9780819568199
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
In France in 1933, two sisters, presumed to be lovers, murdered the women who employed them as maids. Known as “the Papin affair,” the incident inspired not only Jean Genet's 1947 The Maids but also an essay by Jacques Lacan that presents the sisters' crime as fueled by a narcissistic, homosexual drive that culminated in the assault. In this new investigation of the roots of the twentieth-century myth of the lesbian-as-madwoman, Christine Coffman argues that the female psychotic was the privileged object of Lacan’s effort to derive a revolutionary theory of subjectivity from the study of mental illness. Examining Lacan's early writings, French surrealism, Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, and H.D.’s homoerotic fiction in light of feminist and queer theory, Insane Passions argues that the psychotic woman that fascinates modernist writers returns with a murderous vengeance in a number of late twentieth-century films—including Basic Instinct, Sister My Sister, Single White Female, and Murderous Maids. Marking the limit of social acceptability, the “psychotic lesbian” repeatedly appears as the screen onto which the violence and madness of twentieth-century life are projected.

Surrealism and the Art of Crime

Surrealism and the Art of Crime PDF Author: Jonathan Paul Eburne
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801446740
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Corpses mark surrealism's path through the twentieth century, providing material evidence of the violence in modern life. Though the shifting group of poets, artists, and critics who made up the surrealist movement were witness to total war, revolutionary violence, and mass killing, it was the tawdry reality of everyday crime that fascinated them. Jonathan P. Eburne shows us how this focus reveals the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the thought and artwork of the surrealists and establishes their movement as a useful platform for addressing the contemporary problem of violence, both individual and political. In a book strikingly illustrated with surrealist artworks and their sometimes gruesome source material, Eburne addresses key individual works by both better-known surrealist writers and artists (including André Breton, Louis Aragon, Aimé Césaire, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dalí) and lesser-known figures (such as René Crevel, Simone Breton, Leonora Carrington, Benjamin Péret, and Jules Monnerot). For Eburne "the art of crime" denotes an array of cultural production including sensationalist journalism, detective mysteries, police blotters, crime scene photos, and documents of medical and legal opinion as well as the roman noir, in particular the first crime novel of the American Chester Himes. The surrealists collected and scrutinized such materials, using them as the inspiration for the outpouring of political tracts, pamphlets, and artworks through which they sought to expose the forms of violence perpetrated in the name of the state, its courts, and respectable bourgeois values. Concluding with the surrealists' quarrel with the existentialists and their bitter condemnation of France's anticolonial wars, Surrealism and the Art of Crime establishes surrealism as a vital element in the intellectual, political, and artistic history of the twentieth century.

Moving Targets

Moving Targets PDF Author: Helen Birch
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520085749
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
The rampaging female has become a new clich in Hollywood cinema, a sexy beauty stabbing and shooting her way to box-office success. Fatal Attraction, Thelma and Louise, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and Single White Female are a few of the recent mainstream films that have attracted huge audiences. Meanwhile, true accounts of a teenager shooting her lover's wife and a battered woman bludgeoning her husband to death get prime news media coverage-and are quickly made into TV movies. This pioneering collection of essays looks at our enduring fascination with women who murder. The authors explore how both fictional and real women are represented, as well as the way society responds to these women. The result is an often shocking picture of female violence that covers a vast territory: the Australian outback, a Florida highway, an Austrian hospital, a French village, and Hollywood. The women are as diverse as their settings: middle-class housewives, prostitutes, house maids, nurses, high-powered professionals. There is much here to provoke controversy. Society's uncertainty over the role of premenstrual syndrome, the fear of lesbianism, female violence as self-defense against patriarchy, and "appropriate" female behavior are issues that push buttons on several levels. Moving Targets is must-reading for anyone concerned with violence and representations of women in our culture.

Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis

Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis PDF Author: Natalya Lusty
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754653363
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Combining historical and cultural methods of analysis with sophisticated theoretical discussions, Natalya Lusty explores how women artists and intellectuals responded to the appropriation of 'the feminine' in Surrealism and psychoanalysis. Reading work by

Justice on Fire

Justice on Fire PDF Author: J. Patrick O'Connor
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700626719
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
On the night of November 29, 1988, near the impoverished Marlborough neighborhood in south Kansas City, an explosion at a construction site killed six of the city’s firefighters. It was a clear case of arson, and five people from Marlborough were duly convicted of the crime. But for veteran crime writer and crusading editor J. Patrick O’Connor, the facts—or a lack of them—didn’t add up. Justice on Fire is O’Connor’s detailed account of the terrible explosion that led to the firefighters’ deaths and the terrible injustice that followed. Justice on Fire describes a misguided eight-year investigation propelled by an overzealous Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agent keen to retire; a mistake-riddled case conducted by a combative assistant US attorney willing to use compromised “snitch” witnesses and unwilling to admit contrary evidence; and a sentence of life without parole pronounced by a prosecution-favoring judge. In short, an abuse of government power and a travesty of justice. O’Connor’s own investigation, which uncovered evidence of witness tampering, intimidation, and prosecutorial misconduct, helped give rise to a front-page series of articles in the Kansas City Star—only to prompt a whitewashing inquiry by the Department of Justice that exonerated the lead ATF agent and named other possible perpetrators who remain unidentified and unindicted. O’Connor extends his scrutiny to this cover-up and arrives at a startling conclusion suggesting that the case of the Marlborough Five is far from closed. Journalists are not supposed to make the news. But faced with a gross injustice, and seeing no other remedy, O’Connor felt he must step in. Justice on Fire is such an intervention.

The Self and Its Pleasures

The Self and Its Pleasures PDF Author: Carolyn J. Dean
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501705407
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Why did France spawn the radical poststructuralist rejection of the humanist concept of 'man' as a rational, knowing subject? In this innovative cultural history, Carolyn J. Dean sheds light on the origins of poststructuralist thought, paying particular attention to the reinterpretation of the self by Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, and other French thinkers. Arguing that the widely shared belief that the boundaries between self and other had disappeared during the Great War helps explain the genesis of the new concept of the self, Dean examines an array of evidence from medical texts and literary works alike. The Self and Its Pleasures offers a pathbreaking understanding of the boundaries between theory and history.