Helene Cixous is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant and innovative contemporary thinkers. Published here in English for the first time Helene Cixous, Rootprints is an ideal introduction to Cixous's theory and her fiction, tracing her development as a writer and intellectual whose remarkable prespicacity and electrifying poetic force are known world-wide. Unprecedented in its form and content this collection breaks new ground in the theory and practice of auto/biography. Cixous's creative reflections on the past provide occasion for scintillating forays into the future. The text includes: * an extended interview between Cixous and Calle-Gruber, exploring Cixous's creative and intellectual processes * a revealing collection of photographs taken from Cixous's family album, set against a poetic reflection by the author * selections from Cixous's private notebooks * a contribution by Jacques Derrida * original 'thing-pieces' by Calle-Gruber.
Rootprints traces Cixous's development as an intellectual and a writer. An extended interview explores her intellectual and creative processes, and a revealing collection of photographs illuminates the connections between memory and diaspora.
In writing Le Livre de Promethea Häl_ne Cixous set for herself the task of bridging the immeasurable distance between love and language. She describes a love between twoøwomen 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."
Hélène Cixous is one of the most brilliant and radical of contemporary theorists. This is the first publication in any language of Cixous' own Notebooks, illustrating the concept of "écriture féminine" and offering new insights into Cixous' theoretical insistence on writing and her own practice as a writer. Cixous' Notebooks exemplify how writing creates unique possibilities for circumventing the mistruths that shape us as subjects and which organize our relations with the world. The Writing Notebooks opens with an introduction which outlines the central points of Cixous' notion of writing. The main body of the work is comprised of 60 photographic extracts from the Notebooks, each extract accompanied by editorial annotation and a translation into English. The book concludes with a new interview with Cixous on the value of the Notebooks, the process of writing and her own fiction. Cixous' Notebooks will be invaluable to students of literature, psychoanalysis, philosophy and feminism.
Hèléne Cixous -- author, playwright and French feminist theorist -- is a key figure in twentieth-century literary theory. Stigmata brings together her most recent essays for the first time. Acclaimed for her intricate and challenging writing style, Cixous presents a collection of texts that get away -- escaping the reader, the writers, the book. Cixous's writing pursues authors such as Stendhal, Joyce, Derrida, and Rembrandt, da Vinci, Picasso -- works that share an elusive movement in spite of striking differences. Along the way these essays explore a broad range of poetico-philosophical questions that have become characteristic of Cixous' work: * love's labours lost and found * feminine hours * autobiographies of writing * the prehistory of the work of art Stigmata goes beyond theory, becoming an extraordinary writer's testimony to our lives and times.
"Born to an Algerian-French father and a German mother, both Jews, Helene Cixous experienced a childhood fraught with racial and gender crises. In this moving story she recounts how small domestic events - a new dog, the gift of a bicycle - reverberate decades later with social and psychological meaning. The story's protagonist, whose life resembles that of the author, endures a double alienation: from Algerians because she is French and from the French because she is Jewish. The isolation and exclusion Cixous and her family feel, especially under the Vichy government and during the Algerian War of independence, underpin this heartbreaking but also warmly human and often funny story. The author-narrator concedes that memories of Algeria awaken in her longings for the sights, sounds, and smells of her home country and ponders how that stormy relationship has influenced her life and thought. A meditation on postcolonial identity and gender, Reveries of the Wild Woman is also a poignant recollection of how childhood is author to the woman."--BOOK JACKET.
"Tragedy and comedy intimately and movingly mingle in Helene Cixous's The Day I Wasn't There. Its narrator, who resembles Cixous, recounts the birth and death of her first child, a Dawn's syndrome baby she abandons to the care of her midwife mother in an Algerian maternity hospital. She uses this event to probe her family history and her relationship with her mother, a refugee from Nazi Germany; her dead father, after whom the baby is named; her doctor brother, who takes the infant under his wing; and her grandmother Omi. Cixous's elusive writing bears all the trademarks of her poetic and provocative style, vivid with wordplay, intense feeling, and a stream of consciousness that moves freely over time and place. Informed by psychoanalytical theory and always brutally honest, The Day I Wasn't There is above all an intimate study of a woman's inner landscape."--BOOK JACKET.
An inventive blend of memoir and family history that ponders those who didn’t flee their German town in time: “Powerfully reclaimed—and imagined—reality.” —The Jewish Chronicle Winner, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and Translation For about eighty years, the Jonas family of Osnabrück were part of a small but vibrant Jewish community in this mid-size city of Lower Saxony. After the war, Osnabrück counted not a single Jew. Most had been deported and murdered in the camps; others emigrated—if they could, and if they managed to overcome their own inertia. It is this inertia and failure to escape that Hélène Cixous seeks to account for in Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem. Vicious anti-Semitism hounded Osnabrück’s Jews long before the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933. So why did people wait to leave when the threat was so clear? Drawn from the stories told to Cixous by her mother, Ève, and grandmother, Rosalie (Rosi), this literary work reimagines fragments of Ève’s and Rosi’s stories, including the death of Ève’s uncle, Onkel André. Piecing together the story of Andreas Jonas from what she was told and from what she envisions, Cixous recounts the tragedy of the one she calls the King Lear of Osnabrück, who followed his daughter to Jerusalem only to be sent away by her, returning to Osnabrück in time to be deported to a death camp. Cixous wanders the streets of the city she’d heard about all her life, digs into its archives, meets city officials, all the while wondering if she should have come. These reflections in the present are woven with scenes from her childhood in Algeria and the half-remembered, half-invented stories of the Jonas family, making Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem one of the author’s most intensely engaging books. “An inventive literary account of Cixous’s remarkable journey to her mother’s birthplace and of the Jewish community of a German town that was wiped out in the Holocaust.” —Literary Hub, “The Best of the University Presses” This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).
A lucid, original and inventive critical introduction to Helene Cixous (1937-). Royle offers close readings of many of her works, from Inside (1969) to the present. He foregrounds Cixous's importance for 'English literature' as well as creative writing, autobiography, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, ecology, gender studies and queer theory.
