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This is the first sustained study of the formation of identity in the fictions of Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett. In works like Beckett's prose Trilogy, or Genet's Journal du Voleur and Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, the human is beset by social exclusion and bodily disintegration. The sense of self which arises from this predicament is bound up with the sensation of abjection, the site of both a radical oppression and a paradoxical resurgence. Genet's and Beckett's affiliation with abjection frames questions of selfhood, body and language which continue to be posed with particular urgency in contemporary writing and theory.
List of contents
Contents: Abjection: Theory and Writing - Origins: Parenting Fictions - Transgressive Sanctities - Visions and Derelictions - The Body Abject - Textual Abjects.
Report
"....Houston-Jones' arguments produce many interesting insights and observations including an illuminating discussion of figures of transgression and of the sacred in 'Notre-Dame-des Fleurs', 'Miracle de la Rose' and Beckett's 'Trilogy', as well as lucid insights into the portrayal of the bodily in such works and the way in which the representation of bodily experience, as abject, is connected within this context to the precarious status of narrative form and signification." (Ian James, European Journal of English Studies)
