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Article: David Houston Jones. The Body Abject: Self and Text in Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett.(Book Review)
- Article from:
- French Forum
- Article date:
- March 22, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 University of Nebraska Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Oxford: Peter Lang, 2000. 213 pp.
David Houston Jones's well-researched book makes a convincing argument that a viable reading of the texts of Genet and Beckett can be made through the concept of the abject, which he associates with marginality. In the Introduction, Jones explains the abject through Julia Kristeva's Pouvoirs de l'horreur: essai sur l'abjection, which argues that identity can be derived from expulsion in which the Self, no longer constituted as an object in the eyes of the Other, becomes abject. The marginality of Genet's petty criminals, beggars, and traitors or Beckett's tramps is exacerbated by bodily breakdown, thereby further accentuating the ...