Word: genet
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While at Harvard, Scott played nearly twenty roles ranging from a Tennessee Williams teenager to the octogenarian King Lear. He was the first person in America to play Maurice in Genet's Deathwatch, and his recreation of the part in New York won him an Obie award. The New York critics named him Most Promising Actor of the Year for his 1960 Broadway performance in The Cool World...
...shocking artists from Swift to Joyce were so vehemently condemned at first. It hardly follows that any writer who manages to shock is therefore automatically entitled to respect as a worthy rebel. Yet this is how their followers regard the heroes of today's avantgarde, notably Jean Genet (Our Lady of the Flowers) and William Burroughs (Naked Lunch). "The new immoralists" is what they are labeled by Partisan Review Editor William Phillips, who is anything but a literary reactionary. He adds: "To embrace what is assumed to be beyond the pale is taken as a sign of true sophistication...
...Genet, Burroughs and other chroniclers of fagotry and fellatio are different from the realists of sex like Zola, the sentimentalists of sex like D. H. Lawrence, the poetic demons of sex like Baudelaire. They are different from the good old-fashioned pornographers like Fanny Hill's Cleland or the masters of bawdry from Ovid to Aretino, Rabelais, Boccaccio and (in an off moment) Mark Twain. However unconventional, these writers found delight in sex; however critical of human folly, they were partisans of mankind. The new immoralists attack not only society but man and sex itself. Their writings...
...horror and lovelessness; but that is simply the old error of confusing art with event, a propagation of the notion that a novel trying to convey dullness must be dull. Sheer nightmare does not redeem a book any more than sheer polly-annaism. The Genet-Burroughs crowd, including such lesser sensationalists as John Rechy (City of Night) and Hubert Selby (Last Exit to Brooklyn), are not pornographers, if pornography is defined as arousing sexual excitement. These writers have created a pornography of nausea, which if anything has the opposite effect. They are thus the enemies of the hedonist almost more...
Like Jean Genet, Jones, who is rnarried to a white woman, has the gift for projecting his fantasy life directly onto a stage. His chief fantasy is retaliation. In these plays, the Negro has the gun. He gives the orders, he slugs, he kills, he wins. Dramatically, the virtue of this is that action follows idea like a dagger thrust without the shadow of explanations, descriptions and rationalizations that fall on drama like a blight...