In the following essay, Gourgouris examines Genet's poetics through his widely known and embraced identity as a criminal and his later association with revolutionary groups.

In the following essay, Plunka describes Genet's use of ethnological rites of passage in Les Nègres.

in the following essay, Katz explores Genet's personal involvement in his work, providing a comprehensive background on the author's perspective.

In the following essay, Katz examines Genet's techniques to convey meaning in his writing.

In the following essay, Plunka observes the connection between sainthood and criminality in Genet's works.

In the following excerpt, Thompson provides a broad discussion of race within The Blacks, arguing that the purpose of the play is not the determination of “blackness,” but the dramatization of white guilt and how to embrace the issue of racial relations.

In the following essay, Connon discusses the role of the audience in The Blacks, focusing on Genet's direct implication of its racial composition and his intentional creation of discomfort.

In the following essay, Pizzato provides a Lacanian psychoanalytic reading of Genet's works, focusing on Genet's creation of a self in both his life and works.

In the following essay, Witt argues that Genet's works have a subtextual female presence, which serves as a source of destruction for the male-ordered world he presents.

In the following essay, Warner compares the characters in Les Nègres with black writers who sought to celebrate their ethnicity.

In the following essay, Cornford explores the connection between the narrator's expressions of his own grief and the construction of his narrated world in Pompes funèbres.

In the following review, Bradby assesses three productions of The Blacks directed by Peter Stein.

Genet is an outcast amid outcasts, a criminal and a pederast—outlaw to society, female to the fraternity of outlaws. When he writes for the stage, he wants his writing not to be fiction, not to be entertainment, not to be a mirror held up to whatever the stage is supposed to mirror, but to be a genuine act of aggression; his play is the continuation of a gesture performed by an outlaw against society. No social protest enters into this outrage; Genet needs the existing order of things. He is Lucifer ...

In the following essay, Kennelly studies the changes Genet made to the text of The Blacks in its two versions, concentrating on the issue of ambiguity.

In the following essay, Hanrahan argues that Genet's sexual symbolism serves to subvert the traditional phallic cult of desire.

In the following essay, Durham explores the role of utopia and collective memory in the political rebellion described by Genet in Un captif amoureux.

Genet's plays, like Pirandello's, have become a treasure house for the rococo critical imagination. As the visitor basks in the heady atmosphere—the mirrors, the screens, masks, grandiose costumes and cothurni, the role-playing, verbal efflorescence, and paradoxes—he burbles about the undecipherable nature of levels, dimensions, contexts, multiple images, loci, ritualism, and infinities of reflections…. Genet takes for granted [in The Balcony the] confusion between sexual ...

Jean Genet's play The Blacks is preceded by the words: "One evening an actor asked me to write a play for an all-black cast. But what exactly is a black? First of all, what's his color?" What color is a black? And, by extension of this paradoxical question, an extension already implicit in its more ambiguous French phrasing, What color is black it-self? Or rather, if blackness is not a matter of complexion but a question of how one exists, what one is, then who among us is entitl...

In [Les Nègres] the characters are masks, they exist as appearance only, and the black skin of the negroes is as much a mask as the grotesque white masks of the actors who mirror us, the white audience, and our society; the dramatic action is presented as performance, and the ritual qualities of this performance are emphasized by incantations, chanting and dancing as well as by echoes of rituals which are central to our christian civilisation: the litanie des blèmes, the music of the dies irae...

In order to defend Lefranc as "hero" of Haute Surveillance, an examination of the structure of the criminal-religious hierarchy as Genet views it becomes imperative. Certainly the most accessible theme in Genet's early works is the theme of the criminal hierarchy, and this theme is stressed in … Haute Surveillance. Particularly revealing is the original title of the play, Préséances, which may be translated as "the right to assume a position above someone or ...

Genet's originality stems from the fact that he has cogently chosen to refuse society's values and has set about to reverse, if only for himself, the moral code of our time. His "Jansenism of Evil," as Sartre calls it [in his illuminating study Saint Genet], is, in reality, a search for identity in an atmosphere of uncertainty. For Genet, as for Shakespeare, the world is a stage, and you and I, the players. In his massive biography of Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre states that the key t...

There has always existed a certain kinship between the spirit of Eastern theater and that of Jean Genet. In the plays written after 1955, however, this affinity becomes much more evident. There is a sharp difference between the visual simplicity, for example, of Deathwatch and The Maids and the richness of later plays like The Balcony, The Blacks, and The Screens. The appearance of monsters, masks, exaggerated costumes, music, the stress on ritual and ceremony, all indicate a fundamental change in technique...