Jean Genet: Performance and Politics

Jean Genet: Performance and Politics

Author: C. Finburgh

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2006-10-31

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 023059543X

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This is the first book to explore the broad political significance of Genet's performance practice by focusing on his radical experiments, polemical subjects and formal innovations in theatre, film and dance. Its new approach brings together the diverse aspects of Genet's work through essays by international scholars and interviews.


The politics of Jean Genet's late theatre

The politics of Jean Genet's late theatre

Author: Carl Lavery

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2017-10-03

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1526130408

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Jean Genet and the politics of theatre is the first publication to situate the politics of Genet's theatre within the social, spatial and political contexts of France in the 1950s and 1960s. The book's innovative approach departs significantly from existing scholarship on Genet. Where scholars have tended to bracket Genet as either an absurdist, ritualistic or, more recently, a resistant playwright, this study argues that his theory and practice of political theatre have more in common with the affirmative ideas of thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou. By doing so, the monograph positions Genet as a revolutionary playwright, interested in producing progressive forms of democracy. This original and interdisciplinary reading of Genet’s late work will be of interest to students and practitioners of Theatre, as well as those interested in French and History.


Jean Genet

Jean Genet

Author: David Bradby

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-03-15

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1134188277

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This book is the only introductory text to Genet in English, offering an overview of this key figure in defining and understanding twentieth-century theatre. The authors provide a comprehensive account of Genet's key plays and productions, his early life and his writing for and beyond the theatre.


Jean Genet and the Semiotics of Performance

Jean Genet and the Semiotics of Performance

Author: Laura Oswald

Publisher:

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13:

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When Jean Genet, the enfant terrible of the French theater, died on April 15, 1986, he left a rich and controversial literary legacy. Genet, a homosexual and ex-convict, wrote about events and in a language that could ruffle the complacency of the most sophisticated reader. His work can be seen as a struggle of the social outcast to be heard from beyond the borders of the dominant, heterosexual culture. This challenging book tracks the effects of this struggle in Genet's novels, plays, film, and political essays by means of a general semiotics of performance. By staging a dialogue between Genet and writers such as Derrida, Bakhtin, Metz, Ricoeur, and Benveniste, Laura Oswald pursues the question of performance in the form of a debate rather than that of a closed theoretical system. Her approach puts into play relations between semiotics and philosophy and provides a means of understanding the relationship between Genet's poetics and his radical politics. By focusing on the role of the double in Genet's literary imagination and by reading Genet with his "others" in the realm of theory, Oswald comes to grips with the overriding concerns of a man whose life in literature was never very far from his life as prisoner, as outcast, as self-proclaimed exile


Political Performances

Political Performances

Author: Susan C. Haedicke

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 9042026065

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Political Performances: Theory and Practice emerges from the work of the Political Performances Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research/Fédération Internationale pour la Recherche de Théâtrale. The collection of essays strives to interrogate definitions and expand boundaries of political performance. Members of Political Performances are from around the world and so approach the intersection of politics and performance from very different perspectives. Some focus on socio-political context, others on dramatic content, others on political issues and activism, and still others examine the ways in which communities perform their collective identity and political agency. The organizational structure of Political Performances highlights the variety of ways in which politics and performance converge. Each section - "Queries", "Texts", "Contexts" and "Practice" - frames this confluence according to certain common threads that emerge from essays that deal with topics from the ethics of autobiographical performance, the political efficacy of verbatim theatre, the challenges of community-based performance, political and self-censorship, and the impossibility of representing atrocity. The essays challenge existing ideas of political performance and point the way to new approaches.


Shifting Paradigms in Culture

Shifting Paradigms in Culture

Author: Payal Nagpal

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2015-09-18

Total Pages: 130

ISBN-13: 1443883468

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Jean Genet is a writer known for contradictions in his life and in his creative endeavours. As a playwright, he has been classified in various categories: as a part of the Theatre of the Absurd, as a representative of the rights of the gay community, as a spokesperson of the Palestinian cause, and so on. His comments about his life and works further complicate things. This book frees Jean Genet’s plays from the overpowering Sartrean perspective, and offers an interpretation that reveals the otherwise hidden spaces of the prison, brothel or the maid’s garret ingrained in them. The plays selected for analysis in this study make a bold statement about areas in society that escaped the attention of contemporary dramatists. In the process, the existing social fabric is meaningfully subjected to the playwright’s gaze; this is achieved through the creation of a stage dynamic different from the one adopted by the Theatre of the Absurd. The chapters in the book explain paradigms informing the plays and enabling the viewer to forge their own response. Discussions in the book take the reader to possibilities of invention and experimentation in an act that belongs to the stage as much as to the world it controls. This book traverses challenging issues and spaces – the areas inhabited by the blacks, the ghettoized existence of social discards, and others rotting on the margins in the post-Second World War period. It is clearly suggested that the playwright spoke from his own experiences and of those others with whom he empathized; into these aspects he infused his imaginative and creative skills. An important method of enquiry used in this study is that of the panoptic machinery: the tower and its function of keeping watch on people caught in the web of the oppressive modern state. It is highlighted that the panopticon survives by hiding its dialectical link with its inhabitants. The panopticon can remain only as long as it conceals – therein lies its threatening presence. The three segments into which the discussion is divided are: “Role-playing and The Maids,” “The Panopticon and The Balcony,” and “Decolonisation and The Blacks.”


Queens and Revolutionaries

Queens and Revolutionaries

Author: Pascale Gaitet

Publisher: University of Delaware Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 9780874138269

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Queens and Revolutionaries proposes new readings of Genet that focus on the two areas that Saint Genet does not adequately address: sex and politics. The book first demonstrates how Sartre's empasis on a range of binary oppositions fails to do justice to the complex interplay of agency and determinism in Genet's novels of the 1940s. Using contemporary feminist and gender theory to elucidate the fluctuations, oscillations, and reversals in Genet's representations of cross-dressing and homosexuality, the readings show how these representations in turn reveal those theories limitations. The second half of the book turns to lesser known work dating from the late 1960s onward, and to 'Prisoner of Love', in order to contest Sartre's insistence on the non-political nature of Genet's work. It examines Genet's texts on the Black Panthers and the Palestinians, highlighting his political engagement after May 1968. It also traces the continuities from his earlier work, and shows how revolutionary aesthetics, theatricality, and performance are now increasingly reconceptualised as explicitly political acts.


Genet, Lacan and the Ontology of Incompletion

Genet, Lacan and the Ontology of Incompletion

Author: James Penney

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-12-29

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1350300519

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Bringing Jean Genet and Jacques Lacan into dialogue, James Penney examines the overlooked similarities between Genet's literary oeuvre and Lacanian psychoanalysis, uncovering in particular their shared ontology of fragility and incompletion. This book exposes the two thinkers' joint and unwavering ontological conviction that the representations that make up the world of appearances are inherently enigmatic: inscrutable, not only on the level of their problematic link to knowledge and meaning, but also, more fundamentally, as concerns the reliability of their existence. According to Genet and Lacan, the signification of words and images will forever remain unfulfilled, just like the whole of reality, as if prematurely removed from the oven, under-baked. Genet, Lacan and the Ontology of Incompletion reveals how, in the same manner as Lacan's psychoanalytic act, Genet's acts of poetry further seek to expose the fragile prop that holds our reality together, baring the fissures in being for which fantasy normally compensates. Moving away from scholarship that considers Genet's plays, novels, sexuality and politics in isolation, Penney explores the whole span of Genet's work, from his early novels to the posthumously-published Prisoner of Love and, combining this with psychoanalysis, opens up new avenues for thinking about Genet, Lacan and our wanting being.


Contemporary French Theatre and Performance

Contemporary French Theatre and Performance

Author: C. Finburgh

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-05-17

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0230305660

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This is the first book to explore the relationship between experimental theatre and performance making in France. Reflecting the recent return to aesthetics and politics in French theory, it focuses on how a variety of theatre and performance practitioners use their art work to contest reality as it is currently configured in France.