Hélène Cixous

Dreamer, realist, analyst, writing

Nicholas Royle

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781526160454
  9781526140661
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526140685
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book provides a wide-ranging and up-to-date critical introduction to the writings of Hélène Cixous (1937-), focusing on key motifs, such as dreams, the supernatural, literature, psychoanalysis, creative writing, realism, sexual differences, laughter, secrets, the 'Mother unconscious', drawing, painting, life writing, telephones, non-human animals, telepathy and the 'art of cutting'. There are close readings of Shakespeare, Brontë, Shelley, Poe, Carroll, Freud, Woolf, Joyce, Beckett and Derrida, for example, alongside in-depth explorations of her own writings, from Inside (1969) and 'The Laugh of the Medusa' (1975) up to the present. Royle's book will be useful to students and academics coming to Cixous's work for the first time, but it will also appeal to readers interested in contemporary literature, creative writing, life writing, narrative theory, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, trauma studies, feminism, queer theory, ecology, drawing and painting.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword: Forewarnings
• Acknowledgements
• A note on references
• 1 Introduction: dreamer, realist, analyst, writing
• 2 Cixous cuts: through everything
• 3 Advertisement: the joys of literature and the return of the dead
• 4 Cixous cuts: take time
• 5 Dream in literature
• 6 Cixous cuts: from the axe to giving birth
• 7 Away
• 8 Cixous cuts: the veil in me
• 9 Portmanteau
• 10 Cixous cuts: Lewis Carroll
• 11 To awake, Shakespeare of the Night
• 12 Dream treatment: on sitting down to read a letter from Freud
• 13 Side thinking
• 14 All wards
• 15 Four words for Cixous
• 16 The one time Hélène Cixous entered my garden
• Index of works by Cixous
• General index