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Jean Genet and the Semiotics of Performance

by Laura Oswald

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.

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Table of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • Dedication
  • Contents
  • A Note on Authorship
  • Acknowledgements
  • Introduction
  • One The Scene of Silence
  • Two The Discourse of the Other
  • Three Semiosis as Performance
  • Four The Perversion of I/Eye in Un Chant d’amour
  • Five Passion: Between Text and Performance
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index

Metadata

  • isbn
    978-0-253-05328-2
  • publisher
    Indiana University Press
  • publisher place
    Bloomington, Indiana USA
  • restrictions
    CC-BY-NC-ND
  • rights
    Copyright © Trustees of Indiana University
  • rights holder
    Indiana University Press
  • rights territory
    World
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