Saint Genet

Saint Genet
Author: Jean-Paul Sartre
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 637
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0816677603

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

Saint Genet Decanonized

Saint Genet Decanonized
Author: Loren Ringer
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2001
Genre: Homosexuality in literature
ISBN: 9789042015869

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.

Our Lady of the Flowers

Our Lady of the Flowers
Author: Jean Genet
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Total Pages: 207
Release: 1994-01-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0802194249

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
Author: Jean Genet
Publisher:
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2019-03-07
Genre: Autobiographical fiction
ISBN: 9780571340835

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
Author: Jean Genet
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 460
Release: 2023-05-31
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1681378418

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
Author: Jean Genet
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 129
Release: 2020-01-21
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1681373629

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.

Reader's Guide to Lesbian and Gay Studies

Reader's Guide to Lesbian and Gay Studies
Author: Timothy F. Murphy
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 762
Release: 2000
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 9781579581428

A guide to existing academic literature on issues, persons, periods, and topics important in lesbian and gay studies. With a focus on book-length studies in English, entries offer a very brief introduction and a more detailed overview of the secondary literature, including the relative merits of each source under consideration. While the overall arrangement of entries is alphabetical, other means of access include a booklist, general indexes, cross references, and a thematic list (African American culture, AIDS, art and artists, Asian studies, biological sciences, lesbian and gay culture, education, family, gender studies, history, law, literature, media studies, medicine, music, performing arts, politics, psychology, philosophy and ethics, and others). Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Against Interpretation

Against Interpretation
Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2013-10-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1466853522

Includes the essay "Notes on Camp," the inspiration for the 2019 exhibition Notes on Fashion: Camp at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and is a modern classic. Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It includes the groundbreaking essays "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation," as well as her impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Levi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thought. This edition has a new afterword, "Thirty Years Later," in which Sontag restates the terms of her battle against philistinism and against ethical shallowness and indifference.

Leo Bersani

Leo Bersani
Author: Mikko Tuhkanen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2020-11-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1623560691

For the past 60 years, Leo Bersani has inspired, resisted, guided, and challenged scholarly work in the fields of literary criticism, queer theory, cultural studies, psychoanalytic theory, and film and visual studies. Moving across an impressive range of sources, Mikko Tuhkanen seeks out the “fundamental notes”-the questions that we find and refind-in Bersani's extensive oeuvre across the decades. The chapters explore Bersani's engagement with psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Laplanche, Klein, Lacan), French and American modernist fiction (Proust, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, James, Beckett), poststructuralist theory (Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Blanchot), queer theory (Butler, Edelman), and the visual arts (Caravaggio, Almodóvar, Pasolini, Malick, Dumont). This first introduction to Bersani's work provides a chronological overview of his thought and details his contributions to literary studies and critical theory.