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Mettray revisited in Jean Genet's Le Langage de la muraille
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Davis, Oliver (2016) Mettray revisited in Jean Genet's Le Langage de la muraille. French History, 30 (4). pp. 546-566. doi:10.1093/fh/crw054 ISSN 0269-1191.
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crw054
Abstract
This article returns to careceral entrepreneur Frédéric-Auguste Demetz’s model reformatory at Mettray by rereading its archive and existing historical scholarship in light of a littleknown major work by its most famous inmate, gay novelist and playwright, thief and leftist agitator, Jean Genet (1910–86): Le Langage de la muraille. Genet was responding, with his own characteristically light-fingered form of autodidactic historical scholarship, to Michel Foucault’s appropriation of Mettray in Surveiller et punir (1975). In my return to the archives of this model institution, I argue that Mettray was an exemplary exercise in liberal statecraft’s mixture of coaxing and coercion; and that Demetz was an unrivalled master of ‘the language of the wall’. This was a distinctly modern practice of administrative governance by partitioning, an art of containment continuous with harder forms of policing in tending towards the suppression of democratic politics
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subjects: | P Language and Literature > PQ Romance literatures | ||||||
| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > School of Modern Languages and Cultures > French Studies Faculty of Arts > School of Modern Languages and Cultures |
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| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Le Langage de la muraille, Genêt, Jean, 1910-1986, Demetz, M. (Frédéric-Auguste), 1796-1873, Mettray Penal Colony | ||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | French History | ||||||
| Publisher: | Oxford University Press | ||||||
| ISSN: | 0269-1191 | ||||||
| Official Date: | 1 December 2016 | ||||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 30 | ||||||
| Number: | 4 | ||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 546-566 | ||||||
| DOI: | 10.1093/fh/crw054 | ||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||
| Date of first compliant deposit: | 18 November 2016 | ||||||
| Date of first compliant Open Access: | 1 December 2018 |
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