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Genet's Fantastic Voyage In Miracle De La Rose: All At Sea About Maternity, Elizabeth Richardson Viti

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Together psychoanalytical and feminist criticism appear to uncover the very composition of Jean Genet's inversion. Indeed, in this regard the Miracle de la Rose dream sequence which focuses on an extraordinary voyage through the body of Harcamone, the very imprimatur of bisexuality defined in Cixous' Le rire de la méduse, holds singular importance. Abandoned by his biological mother, Genet sees himself as a "produit synthétique" who has to belong to someone in order to be. Genet simply does not exist unless he can establish, not the Lacanian Name-of-the-Father, but rather the Name-of-the-Mother. The dream reveals a Freudian …

Text As Locus, Inscription As Identity: On Barbara Honigmann's Roman Von Einem Kinde , Marilyn Sibley Fries

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Barbara Honigmann's Roman von einem Kinde (1986) constitutes the author's attempt at narrative self-definition. In this and other regards, it is similar to Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster (1976; Patterns of Childhood, 1980), with which it is briefly compared.

Honigmann's slim collection of stories, conceived by her as "sketches for self-portraits and landscapes," depicts the absolute isolation ofthe female Jewish narrator in the GDR and her search for community (Heimat) via language. Simultaneously, it records that narrator's desire to identify "places of transition," "boundaries at which conditions change" without fixing these in a static prison of text. The narrator-mother …