Böcker av Mairead Hanrahan

In this book, Mairéad Hanrahan examines the shifts in political focus in Genet's writing, from the intimate fantasies of the early novels to the struggle for emancipation of the Palestinians in the posthumously published Un Captif amoureux. She argues that his texts have always been centrally concerned with power relations, challenging from the very beginning the opposition that traditionally confines the political to the public sphere. Genet's writing has always been political - but Hanrahan argues also that it was never solely political. On the contrary, a tension always existed for him between the poetic and the political.Genet's changing focus from the personal to the public is explored via the shifts in his practice of genre. Analysing how genre and politics are inextricably involved in Genet's writing, Hanrahan highlights a core paradox in its evolution. This writer who remained constant over the course of his life in his opposition to hegemonic power relations grappled throughout his work with the suspicion that his art may serve to shore up the very structures he unreservedly contests. Yet his writing also testifies, in both what it says and what it does, to the idea that literature is fundamentally at odds with the social order of the world.Mairéad Hanrahan is Professor of French at University College London.

Helene Cixous, author of over forty works of fiction, was deemed by Derrida to be the greatest living writer in French in 1990. Consistent with this evaluation, her writing is renowned for its dense poetical texture and lyricism. At the same time, she has been described by one of Derrida's translator's, Peggy Kamuf, as 'one of our age's greatest semi-theoreticians'. Connecting these two views, this book argues for a consideration of her texts as 'semi-fictions'. Telling stories is, irreducibly, part of what Cixous does; it is irreducibly part of what she does. Fiction is at once the creation of an imaginary world and an ethical engagement, as intellectual as it is passionate, with the difficulties of the real. This book offers an in-depth reading of five different texts, addressing the idiomatic specificity of individual works and investigating how the textual fabric unfolds. It shows that the narrative dimension to Cixous's writing needs to be reckoned with as a key component of the way it troubles the borders between fiction and its others. Each work is approached in relation to a particular theoretical question or discourse to explore how, in staging an encounter with something beyond itself, her fiction is the site of an active thinking.