Book Description
Adapted from a special issue of Literature Interpretation Theory, Hélène Cixous: Critical Impressions explores one of the most significant voices in contemporary literature. Bringing together prominent critics from around the globe to explore the range and impact of Hélène Cixous' work, this collection of essays approaches Cixous from the perspectives of feminist theory, materialist criticism, biographical criticism, and reader- response methodologies. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Lispector would turn over in her grave...
Cixous has been made famous for bringing attention to Clarice Lispector, but unfortunately, she completely misrepresents Lispector's work and uses it in a way completely antithetical to its purpose. Let me make clear that Lispector's work deserves attention, but it is far more intelligent than Cixous can comprehend. Cixous' work is completely disingenuous: celebratory of women writers while at the same time objectifying them. She hides behind obfuscation as a defense against appearing to objectify (at times sexually) Lispector, but her equivocations are nothing more than intellectual smoke and mirrors.

My advice. Skip this book, at least until you have read and come to love Lispector's work on the writer's terms. If you have to write about Lispector in academia, sooner or later you need to confront Cixous' take on Lispector, but don't take it for having substance. ... Read more

Book Description
Helene Cixous: live theory provides a clear and informative introduction to one of the most important and influential European writers working today. The book opens with an overview of the key features of Cixous's theory of 'écriture féminine' (feminine writing). The various manifestations of 'écriture féminine' are then explored in chapters on Cixous's fictional and theatrical writing, her philosophical essays, and her intensely personal approach to literary criticism. The book concludes with a new, lively and wide-ranging interview with Hélène Cixous in which she discusses her influences and inspirations, and her thoughts on the nature of writing and the need for an ethical relationship with the world. Also offering a survey of the many English translations of Cixous's work, this book is an indispensable introduction to Cixous's work for students of Literature, Philosophy, Cultural and Gender Studies. ... Read more

Book Description
In writing Le Livre de Promethea Hélène Cixous set for herself the task of bridging the immeasurable distance between love and language. She describes a love between two women in its totality, experienced as both a physical presence and a sense of infinity. The result is a stunning example of Pecriture feminine that won kudos when published in France in 1983. Its translation into English by Betsy Wing will extend the influence of a writer already famous for her novels and contributions to feminist theory.In her introduction Betsy Wing notes the contemporary emphasis on "fictions of presence." Cixous, in The Book of Promethea, works to "repair the separation between fiction and presence, trying to chronicle a very-present love without destroying it in the writing." Betsy Wing is a freelance translator and fiction writer. She translated Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous's La Jeune Née (The Newly Born Woman) into English in 1986. A collection of her fiction, Look Out for Hydrophobia, was published in 1990.Hélène Cixous is also author of the play The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, translated by Juliet Flower MacCannell, Judith Pike, and Lollie Groth (Nebraska 1994). ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

i dug this book
This is the kind of book you can read by opening to a page and reading or cover to cover.. little jewels shaped like words everywhere.

A most precious pillow-book
The type of literature that recreates in the symbolic, exploring the unconscious in an extremely poetic manner, this book, opened on any page at random, will undoubtedly widen your understanding of love and take youwhere you dream to have lived it. Source of inspiration for thoroughintrospection in the most awe-inspiring landscapes of the soul, thematerial mingles with the word to carry you where the body alone cannottake you. An exercise of the feminist language. Some might have got boredby reading it in a conventional way. But, using it with that etherealwisdom that comes from the debris of unbridled passion, it might prove tobe your most precious pillow-book. ... Read more

Book Description

"I used to feel guilty at night. I live in, I always used to live in two countries, the diurnal one and the continuous very tempestuous nocturnal one.... What a delight to head off with high hopes to night's court, without any knowledge of what may happen! Where shall I be taken tonight! Into which country? Into which country of countries?" -- Hélène Cixous, fromDream I Tell You

For years, Hélène Cixous has been writing down fragments of her dreams immediately after awaking. InDream I Tell You, she collects fifty from the past ten years. Cixous's accounts of her dreamscapes resist standard psychoanalytic interpretations and reflect her lyrical, affecting, and deeply personal style. The dreams, reproduced in what Cixous calls both their "brute and innocent state," are infused with Cixous's humor, wit, and sense of playfulness.

Dreams have always been a crucial part of Cixous's writing. They are her archives and it is with them that she writes. Without dreaming, Cixous writes, "I would crumble to dust." As in many of her other texts, Cixous's mother, father, daughter, and friends populate this work, which offers artistic and provocative meditations on the themes of family, death, and resurrection. Scenes of a daily life-getting a haircut, caring for her child, preparing for work-become beautifully and evocatively skewed in Cixous's dreams. She also writes of dreams, both amusing and unsettling, in which she spends an evening with Martin Heidegger, has her lunch quietly interrupted by a young lion, flees the Nazis, and tours Auschwitz.

The "you" of the title is fellow philosopher and friend Jacques Derrida, to whom these texts are addressed. The book reflects on many of the subjects the two grappled with in their work and in conversation: the deconstruction of psychoanalysis, literary production, subjectivity, sexual difference, and the question of friendship.

Book Description

Who can say "I am Jewish?" What does "Jew" mean? What especially does it mean for Jacques Derrida, founder of deconstruction, scoffer at boundaries and fixed identities, explorer of the indeterminate and undecidable? InPortrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous follows the intertwined threads of Jewishness and non-Jewishness that play through the life and works of one of the greatest living philosophers.

Cixous is a lifelong friend of Derrida. They both grew up as French Jews in Algeria and share a "belonging constituted of exclusion and nonbelonging" -- not Algerian, rejected by France, their Jewishness concealed or acculturated. In Derrida's family "one never said 'circumcision'but 'baptism,'not 'Bar Mitzvah'but 'communion.'" Judaism cloaked in Catholicism is one example of the undecidability of identity that influenced the thinker whom Cixous calls a "Jewish Saint."

An intellectual contemporary of Derrida, Cixous's ideas on writing have an affinity with his philosophy of deconstruction, which sought to overturn binary oppositions -- such as man/woman, or Jew/non-Jew -- and blur boundaries of exclusion inherent in Western thought. In portraying Derrida, Cixous uses metonymy, alliteration, rhyme, neologisms, and puns to keep the text in constant motion, freeing language from any rigidity of meaning. In this way she writes a portrait of "Derrida in flight," slipping from one appearance to the next, unable to be fixed in one spot, yet encompassing each point he passes. From the circumcision act to family relationships, through Derrida's works to those of Celan, Rousseau, and Beaumarchais, Cixous effortlessly merges biography and textual commentary in this playful portrait of the man, his works, and being (or not being) Jewish.

Book Description
The cover of A Kind of You features a deadpan image of artist Roni Horn holding a black-and-white image of French Feminist theorist Helene Cixous over her own face. Cixous contributes an essay to this overview of Horn's photo series' from the last seven years--You are the Weather (1995), This is Me, This is You (2000), Cabinet Of (2001), Image (2005) and Weather Reports You (2007). Each series asks fundamental questions about identity, as Cixous' essay explores in her singular way: "Roni Horn turns and returns in every way the question that haunts her: 'Who are you, Face, you who I am, whom I follow, you who look at me without seeing me, you whom I see without knowing whom, you in whom I look at myself, you who would not be without me, you whom I envelope, you who seduce me and into whom I do not enter..." ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description
This digital document is an article from World Literature Today, published by University of Oklahoma on March 22, 1997. The length of the article is 800 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Helene Cixous.
Author: Pamela A. Genova
Publication: World Literature Today (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 1997
Publisher: University of Oklahoma
Volume: v71Issue: n2Page: p348(2)

Article Type: Book Review

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