A paraître/Apparaître: Genet and His Press

Modern Drama, 1985

Every premiere production of a Genet play - indeed, every instance of Genet's appearance on the literary or social scene - has been an occasion for heated controversy, scandal, even outrage. The first production of his fourth play, The Blacks, in 1959 was no exception. At once, the conservative critics were roused to express the kind of horror and rage that had seemed hysterical even in 1891, when its target was Ibsen's Ghosts. The Blacks, wrote Gabriel Marcel, is "the rejection, the spitting forth, the vomiting of everything that has constituted the honor and dignity of the Christian West.” Another critic compared watching the play to being "bashed on the head," adding, "Blasphemies faIl like huge turds on the altars of Faith and Fatherland.” Many saw Genet as an irresponsible iconoclast, "smashing true and false gods indifferently.”

2018

1987

This dissertation asserts that the gest is the benchmark of Brecht\u27s theater and is a basic element of the Beckettian vision. Part one defines the gest for Brecht\u27s work. Chapter one of part one distinguishes gestic drama from other forms. The gest, understood as a historically significant comportment, proves incompatible with traditional plot and character structures. Chapter two suggests that gestic comportments loosen drama\u27s connection to topics. Mother Courage is not about the horrors of war, but about how society chooses war. Chapter four contrasts the gestic, typical -event drama to events-of-character dramas. The distinction is then developed to explain Brecht\u27s attempts to recover the classics by re-emphasizing the telling of stories. Chapter five explains the central notion of the Gesamtgestus in terms of the sceptical readiness of the scientific attitude. Chapters six and seven discuss the role of the Gesamtgestus as a kind of scientific principle in Brecht\u2...

Narrative, 2010

French Studies, 2015

This article explores the thematic and structural significance of the figure of the wound to Jean Genet's Pompes funèbres (1947) and Hélène Cixous's Souffles (1975). With reference to the differences between editions of Pompes funèbres and through a detailed genetic study of the hitherto unexamined manuscripts of Souffles (Cixous's direct response to Genet's novel), the article demonstrates how (self-)censorship becomes constitutive of narrative as such-of its deconstruction and its reconfiguration. By revealing how the later drafts of Cixous's book operate to conceal its poignant autobiographical origin, and playing with the author's ambiguous assertion that 'Ce qui est coupé repousse', the article exposes omission as a productive textual strategy. [.. .] on entre en littérature par lésion. Par la suite chaque oeuvre vit de sa plaie originaire.-Hélène Cixous, Entretien de la blessure 1 'Il n'y a pas à la beauté d'autre origine que la blessure', writes Jean Genet in an essay bearing all the weight of an artistic manifesto. 2 The singular marker of an artist's necessary solitude and suffering, the wound is, for Genet, simultaneously the site of the most secret self and the injury by which it is opened to alterity. Fittingly, Genet's prose writings of the mid-to late 1950s are typified by a deliberate deconstruction constituting a veritable aesthetics of injury: the wound is both the subject and the method of his sketches and essays on Rembrandt (1957 and 1958) and Giacometti (1958) and, most poignantly, of his open letters to a fatally tubercular Roman prostitute (entitled Fragments (1954)) and to Abdallah, his famous funambule (1958). Genet begins his performative Fragments with this disclaimer: 'Les pages qui vont suivre ne sont pas extraites d'un poème: elles devraient y conduire.' 3 And as his career progresses the author is increasingly given to the variety of fecund fragmentation perhaps epitomized by his Ce qui est resté d'un Rembrandt déchiré en petits carrés bien réguliers et foutu aux chiottes (1967): true to its title, Ce qui est resté consists of the remnants of what was once a book-length study on the painter, presented in two obliquely dialoguing columns-notoriously, the structural model for Derrida's

1996

[...] derrikre l'image, c'est le canto qui va se rCvCler puis se rnanifester (on se souviendra aussi du mot d'origine espagnole: canthus qui donne en franGais le mot chant mais qui d6signe alors la face Ctroite dun objet. L'emploi mCtaphorique de ce terme pourrait ainsi signifier le passage de l'image i la fonction incantatoire: la voie Ctroite de l'im-

1997

This thesis interprets the language of the self in both editions of Jean Genet's five works of early prose fiction. Its appendices present the first list of the 65000 words of excisions and variants between the subscribers' (1943-48) and public editions (1949-53). Many critics have interpreted Genet's works in terms of his life, applying to them a reductive notion of the self. Subjectivity in this thesis is a broader concept which addresses the (self-) representation of narrators and characters. I apply close textual analysis to two types of passage (relating to gestures and language consciousness respectively) which represent subjectivity in non-specular language (where one thing does not clearly reflect or refer to another). I use the ubiquitous 'geste' as the guide-word for my analysis of gesture since its usage is similar in each of the texts considered. Gestures are of course mediated by language in Genet's texts but, surprisingly, are only partially represented in visual terms.

1996

Abstract The text of Jean Genet's Les Bonnes that is taught and performed most regularly is the shorter of the two versions of the play published side by side by Jean-Jacques Pauvert in 1954. It is considered the third and final acting script used in the first production of the play. Material from the earlier versions of the play, unused by Louis Jouvet who first directed it at the Thèâtre de l'Athénée in Paris in 1947, went unperformed and is, some fifty years after the premiere of Les Bonnes, essentially unknown.

Jean Genet: Performance and Politics, 2006

Theater places us right at the heart of what is religious-political: in the heart of absence, in negativity, in nihilism as Nietzsche would say, therefore in the question of power. (Jean-François Lyotard) 1 The sacred is a privileged moment […], a moment of the convulsive communication of what is ordinarily stifled. (Georges Bataille) 2

Theatrical Colloquia, 2020

The theatre of Robert Pinget was acclaimed at the Avignon Festival till the 1980s, until it became in spite of itself a representative of the theatrical avant-garde greeted by numerous critics and academic texts. It appears, however, that Pinget’s theatre was the victim of a real misinterpretation. Adventurous life, where romance and destiny mingle, lay the foundations of pingétienne irony, this search for personal tone subjects to uncertainties and other contradictions Robert Pinget’s affiliation with Max Jacob’s is an attempt to approach the avant-garde, but to turn away from it in a subtle way in the last moment. This waltz-hesitation of Pinget will be the basis of a tendency to put this work in the “new novel” or the theatrical avant-garde. The literature of Pinget can be considered as a form of the art of the escape the expression of an incessantly renewed amazement through an acousmatic voice. It is through the theory of the double and the quest for secrecy that we can now rep...

Alienation and Theatricality: Diderot after Brecht, 2011

Alienation [Verfremdung] is a concept that is inextricably linked with the name of Bertolt Brecht; with twentieth-century modernism, the avant-garde and Marxist theory. However, alienation as a sociological and aesthetic notion avant la lettre surfaced already long before the twentieth century in the thought of eighteenth-century French philosopher Denis Diderot. This comparative study destabilizes the dramaturgical definition of 'Verfremdung' we inherited from Brecht, by looking back at the dramaturgical and philosophical writings of Denis Diderot, in particular LE PARADOXE SUR LE COMEDIEN and LE NEVEU DE RAMEAU. It thereby seeks to open up new ways of understanding its aesthetic, political and sociological dimensions and potentialities. If for the Marxist Brecht, alienation constitutes a specific stage in history tied to capitalist socio-economy, it defines for Diderot an inescapable existential condition embedded in human sociality. Brecht uses the alienation-effect to disrupt and hollow out a form of naturalism thriving on subjectivity, identification and illusion; Diderot, by contrast, plunges the spectator into processes of identification and illusion, only to create an awareness of the subject's profound situation of self-delusion. Illusion, subjectivity and identification are thus exploited as aesthetic tools to confront alienated social relations and conditions into which the subject is inscribed. Whilst a Brechtian notion of theatricality purges the theatre of its absorptive capacity, Diderot's baroque theatricality celebrates and expands the theatre in all its dimensions and forces. Publication details: 1st Edition, Oxford: Legenda, 2011. 2nd Edition, London: Routledge, 2017.

First of the Essays in the Art and Theatricality Series

While the intersection of Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet has typically been explored in relation to the absurd,