Saint Genet

Saint Genet PDF Author: Jean-Paul Sartre
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816677603
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 637

Get Book

Book Description
The remarkable and controversial study of the mind, life, and legend of Jean Genet

Saint Genet

Saint Genet PDF Author: Jean-Paul Sartre
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816677603
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 637

Get Book

Book Description
The remarkable and controversial study of the mind, life, and legend of Jean Genet

Saint Genet Decanonized

Saint Genet Decanonized PDF Author: Loren Ringer
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042015869
Category : Homosexuality in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book

Book Description
2002 will mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Saint Genet. Ever since that date, Jean Genet's work has largely been read and interpreted through Sartre's analysis of the author. In this study, the author seeks to liberate Genet's fiction from the philosopher's stranglehold and reopen the work to new venues of interpretation. After challenging the accuracy and pertinence of Sartre's project and describing the problematic influence it has had, the author begins his own investigation of Genet by examining the notion of precarious identity which informs the Genetian text. Through a dense weft of textual maneuvers arises an aesthetically playful approach to sexual identity. From the beginnings of work in the field of sexology, homosexual desire has defied certain types of rigid schematization such as Freud's Oedipus complex. Indeed, it can be better viewed through the alternative interpretive lenses of Deleuze and Guattari who challenge patriarchal order in the study of sexuality. Such an approach eventually leads to a discovery of the body's centrality in Genet's fiction, especially in his last novel Querelle. It is precisely this ludic body that has escaped Sartre's critical eye and many subsequent studies of Genet's literature.

Saint Genet Decanonized

Saint Genet Decanonized PDF Author: Loren Michael Ringer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 510

Get Book

Book Description


Our Lady of the Flowers

Our Lady of the Flowers PDF Author: Jean Genet
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802194249
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Get Book

Book Description
The shattering novel of underground life the New York Times called “a cry of rapture and horror . . . the purest lyrical genius.” Jean Genet’s debut novel Our Lady of the Flowers, which is often considered to be his masterpiece, was written entirely in the solitude of a prison cell. A semi- autobiographical account of one man’s journey through the Paris demi-monde, dubbed “the epic of masturbation” by no less a figure than Jean-Paul Sartre, the novel’s exceptional value lies in its exquisite ambiguity.

The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal PDF Author: Jean Genet
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571340835
Category : Autobiographical fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
Jean Genet, French playwright, novelist and poet, turned the experiences in his life amongst pimps, whores, thugs and other fellow social outcasts into a poetic literature, with an honesty and explicitness unprecedented at the time. Widely considered an outstanding and unique figure in French literature, Genet wrote five novels between 1942 and 1947, now being republished by Faber & Faber in beautiful new paperback editions. The Thief's Journal is perhaps Jean Genet's most authentically autobiographical novel; an account of his impoverished travels across 1930s Europe. The narrator is guilty of vagrancy, petty theft and prostitution, but his writing transforms such degradations into an inverted moral code, where criminality and delinquency become heroic. With a holy trinity of his own making - homosexuality, theft and betrayal - in The Thief's Journal Genet produced a startlingly powerful novel without precedent. Includes a new introduction by Ahdaf Soueif.

Prisoner of Love

Prisoner of Love PDF Author: Jean Genet
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681378418
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 460

Get Book

Book Description
Starting in 1970, Jean Genet—petty thief, prostitute, modernist master—spent two years in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. Always an outcast himself, Genet was drawn to this displaced people, an attraction that was to prove as complicated for him as it was enduring. Prisoner of Love, written some ten years later, when many of the men Genet had known had been killed, and he himself was dying, is a beautifully observed description of that time and those men as well as a reaffirmation of the author's commitment not only to the Palestinian revolution but to rebellion itself. For Genet's most overtly political book is also his most personal—the last step in the unrepentantly sacrilegious pilgrimage first recorded in The Thief's Journal, and a searching meditation, packed with visions, ruses, and contradictions, on such life-and-death issues as the politics of the image and the seductive and treacherous character of identity. Genet's final masterpiece is a lyrical and philosophical voyage to the bloody intersection of oppression, terror, and desire at the heart of the contemporary world.

The Criminal Child

The Criminal Child PDF Author: Jean Genet
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681373629
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 129

Get Book

Book Description
The Criminal Child offers the first English translation of a key early work by Jean Genet. In 1949, in the midst of a national debate about improving the French reform-school system, Radiodiffusion Française commissioned Genet to write about his experience as a juvenile delinquent. He sent back a piece that was a paean to prison instead of the expected horrifying exposé. Revisiting the cruel hazing rituals that had accompanied his incarceration, relishing the special argot spoken behind bars, Genet bitterly denounced any improvement in the condition of young prisoners as a threat to their criminal souls. The radio station chose not to broadcast Genet’s views. “The Criminal Child” appears here with a selection of Genet’s finest essays, including his celebrated piece on the art of Alberto Giacometti.

Saint Genet

Saint Genet PDF Author: Jean-Paul Sartre
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : fr
Pages : 578

Get Book

Book Description


The Rites of Passage of Jean Genet

The Rites of Passage of Jean Genet PDF Author: Gene A. Plunka
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838634615
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 366

Get Book

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.

Jean Genet

Jean Genet PDF Author: Stephen Barber
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1861895933
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Get Book

Book Description
An engaging and challenging introduction to Jean Genet, this concise biography of the French writer and his work cuts directly to the intersection of thought and life that was essential to Genet's creativity. Arguing that Genet's life was an extraordinary spectacle in which the themes of his most revolutionary works were played out, Stephen Barber gives both the work and its singular inspiration in Genet's life their full due. Abandoned, arrested, and repeatedly incarcerated, Genet, who died in 1986, led a life that could best be described as a tour of the underworld of the twentieth century. Similarly, Genet's work is recognized by its nearly obsessive and often savage treatment of certain recurring themes. Sex, desire, death, oppression, domination-these ideas, central to Genet's artistic project, can be seen as preoccupations that arose directly from the artist's travels, imprisonments, sexual and emotional relationships, and political engagements and protests. This trenchant volume focuses directly on the moments in Genet's life in which those preoccupations are vividly projected in his novels, theater works, and film projects. Genet's works have been hugely influential for a vast array of writers, filmmakers, choreographers, and directors, especially at moments of social crisis; thus Genet's life is not only at the root of his own work but also that of many important artists of the twentieth century. With its frank and illuminating introduction by Edmund White, Jean Genet gives readers access to this brilliant and brutal mind.