Description
Book SynopsisA selection of important yet previously untranslated and unpublished essays.
Trade ReviewAs essayist, Helene Cixous always astonishes with the unforeseeable volleys of her poetically driven, politically riven prose. How fortunate her English language readers are to find these priceless texts together in one volume. Time, almost forty years, has passed, but untouched is the absolute youth and vitality of every line. -- Professor Peggy Kamuf, University of Southern California Volleys of Humanity is perhaps the richest single volume of Cixous' critical writings yet published in English. A lucid and beautiful introduction by Eric Prenowitz leads into an explosive salvo of texts, ranging from early essays already justly famous ('Fiction and its Phantoms' and 'The Character of "Character"') to the tremendous title-essay 'Volleys of Humanity', first published in French in 2009. There are also remarkable essays (previously unpublished in English) on Joyce, Clarice Lispector ('the greatest writer in the twentieth century'), and Michel Foucault, as well as on Algeria, US politics and theatre, cities and the unforeseeable. -- Nicholas Royle, University of Sussex As essayist, Helene Cixous always astonishes with the unforeseeable volleys of her poetically driven, politically riven prose. How fortunate her English language readers are to find these priceless texts together in one volume. Time, almost forty years, has passed, but untouched is the absolute youth and vitality of every line. Volleys of Humanity is perhaps the richest single volume of Cixous' critical writings yet published in English. A lucid and beautiful introduction by Eric Prenowitz leads into an explosive salvo of texts, ranging from early essays already justly famous ('Fiction and its Phantoms' and 'The Character of "Character"') to the tremendous title-essay 'Volleys of Humanity', first published in French in 2009. There are also remarkable essays (previously unpublished in English) on Joyce, Clarice Lispector ('the greatest writer in the twentieth century'), and Michel Foucault, as well as on Algeria, US politics and theatre, cities and the unforeseeable.
Table of ContentsA Note on the Texts Series Editor's Preface Introduction: Cixousian Gambols By Eric Prenowitz 1. Fiction and its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche 2. The Character of 'Character' 3. Re Egg-gendring in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake or how Joyce makes us (s)cream with laughter 4. The Pleasure Reinciple or Paradox Lost 5. Reaching the Point of Wheat, or A Portrait of the Artist as a Maturing Woman 6. Letter to Zohra Drif 7. The Names of Oran 8. The Book as One of Its Own Characters 9. How Not to Speak of Algeria 10. The Oklahoma Nature Theatre is Recruiting 11. The Book I Don't Write 12. The Unforeseeable 13. Passion Michel Foucault 14. Promised Cities 15. Volleys of Humanity Acknowledgements Index
