Search results for ""Author Helene Cixous""
Fordham University Press Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory
Manhattan is the tale of a young French scholar who travels to the United States in 1965 on a Fulbright Fellowship to consult the manuscripts of beloved authors. In Yale University’s Beinecke Library, tantalized by the conversational and epistolary brilliance of a fellow researcher, she is lured into a picaresque and tragic adventure. Meanwhile, back in France, her children and no-nonsense mother await her return. A young European intellectual’s first contact with America and the city of New York are the background of this story. The experience of Manhattan haunts this labyrinth of a book as, over a period of thirty-five years, its narrator visits and revisits Central Park and a half-buried squirrel, the Statue of Liberty and a never again to be found hotel in the vicinity of Morningside Heights: a journey into memory in which everything is never the same. Traveling from library to library, France to the United States, Shakespeare to Kafka to Joyce, Manhattan deploys with gusto all the techniques for which Cixous’s fiction and essays are known: rapid juxtapositions of time and place, narrative and description, analysis and philosophical reflection. It investigates subjects Cixous has spent her life probing: reading, writing, and the “omnipotence-other” seductions of literature; a family’s flight from Nazi Germany and postcolonial Algeria; childhood, motherhood, and, not least, the strange experience of falling in love with a counterfeit genius.
£13.99
Columbia University Press Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint
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? In Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, French feminist philosopher Helene 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.
£72.00
Seagull Books London Ltd We Defy Augury
We defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come … the readiness is all. Under the sign of Hamlet’s last act, Hélène Cixous, in her eightieth year, launched her new book—and the latest chapter in her Human Comedy, her Search for Lost Time. Surely one of the most delightful, in its exposure of the seams of her extraordinary craft, We Defy Augury finds the reader among familiar faces. In these pages we encounter Eve, the indomitable mother; Jacques Derrida, the faithful friend; children, neighbors; and always the literary forebears: Montaigne, Diderot, Proust, and, in one moving passage, Erich Maria Remarque. We Defy Augury moves easily from Cixous’s Algerian childhood, to Bacharach in the Rhineland, to, eerily, the Windows on the World restaurant atop the World Trade Center, in the year 2000. In one of the most astonishing passages in this tour-de-force performance of the art of digression, Cixous proclaims: “My books are free in their movements and in their choice of routes […] They are the product of many makers, dreamed, dictated, cobbled together.” This unique experience, which could only have come from the pen of Cixous, is now available in English, and readers are sure to delight in this latest work by one of France’s most celebrated writer-philosophers.
£16.99
Columbia University Press Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing
Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing is a poetic, insightful, and ultimately moving exploration of 'the strange science of writing.' In a magnetic, irresistible narrative, Cixous reflects on the writing process and explores three distinct areas essential for 'great' writing: The School of the Dead-the notion that something or someone must die in order for good writing to be born; The School of Dreams-the crucial role dreams play in literary inspiration and output; and The School of Roots-the importance of depth in the 'nether realms' in all aspects of writing. Cixous's love of language and passion for the written word is evident on every page. Her emotive style draws heavily on the writers she most admires: the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, the Austrian novelists Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, Dostoyevsky and, most of all, Kafka.
£22.00
Fordham University Press Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem
An inventive literary account of Cixous’s remarkable journey to her mother’s birthplace 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 all of Osnabrück’s Jews long before the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933. So why did people wait to leave when the threat was so patent, so in-their-face? 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 envisages, 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 and to return to Osnabrück in time to be deported to a death camp. Cixous wanders the streets of the city she had heard about all her life in her mother’s and grandmother’s stories, digs into its archives, meets city officials, all the while wondering if she should have come. These hesitations and reflections in the present, often voiced in dialogues staged with her own son or daughter, 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. 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).
£16.99
Edinburgh University Press Poetry in Painting: Writings on Contemporary Arts and Aesthetics
The first book by Helene Cixous on painting and the contemporary arts. This collection gathers most of Helene Cixous' short texts devoted to contemporary artists, such as the painter Nancy Spero, the photographer Andres Serrano, the visual artists Roni Horn and Ernest Pignon-Ernest, the fashion designer Sonia Rykiel and the choreographer Karine Saporta, among others. The artworks belong to different genres and media: photography, painting, installations, film, choreography and fashion design. Nevertheless, Helene Cixous' texts all deal with some of her privileged themes: exile, war, violence (against women) and exclusion, as well as love, memory, beauty and tenderness. Neither art criticism nor critical essays, Helene Cixous responds to these artworks as a poet, reading them as if they were poems. Written between 1985 and 2010, most of these essays are unpublished in English, or published only in rare catalogues or art books. Key Features *Combines poetic, theoretical and critical writing and Cixous' unique methodology *Addresses an important collection of contemporary artists, including Americans Nancy Spero and Roni Horn, the London artist Maria Chevska, the Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson, the filmmaker Ruth Bekermann, the French choreographer Karine Saporta and the French fashion designer Sonia Rykiel. *Treats a range of media and genre: photography, painting, installations, film, choreography, fashion design
£85.00
Hatje Cantz Camille Henrot: Mother Tongue
“IN MANY LANGUAGES, ‘UNDERSTANDING’ ALSO COMES FROM THE IDEA OF PUTTING SOMETHING INSIDE YOUR BODY” – CAMILLE HENROT Over the past twenty years, Camille Henrot has developed a critically acclaimed practice that moves seamlessly between drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and film. Mother Tongue is Henrot’s first publication focused solely on painting and drawing, bringing together over 200 works from the series System of Attachment, Wet Job, and Soon, created between 2018 and 2022. This recent body of work addresses the ambivalent nature of care and the tension between the simultaneous developmental need for attachment and independence, beginning at infancy and continuing throughout life. Her deeply personal and intimate interrogations ultimately relate to broader questions such as the expectations placed on mothers and the representation of the female body. This richly illustrated catalogue is accompanied by texts from Emily LaBarge, Legacy Russell, Marcus Steinweg, Hélene Cixous, Seamus Kealy, and a conversation with Camille Henrot and curator Julika Bosch.
£43.20
Harvard University Press “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays
This collection presents six essays by one of France’s most remarkable contemporary authors. A notoriously playful stylist, here Hélène Cixous explores how the problematics of the sexes—viewed as a paradigm for all difference, which is the organizing principle behind identity and meaning—manifest themselves, write themselves, in texts. These superb translations do full justice to Cixous’s prose, to its songlike flow and allusive brilliance.
£27.86
