
Manhattan
Letters from Prehistory
Helene Cixous(Author)
Fordham University Press
Will be published approx. on 15. December 2007
Book
Hardback
190 pages
978-0-8232-2775-4 (ISBN)
Description
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, as Jacques Derrida writes, "a counterfeit genius."
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, as Jacques Derrida writes, "a counterfeit genius."
Reviews / Votes
"Follows a young French scholar who travels to the U.S. in 1965." -Publishers Weekly "This brilliant book is above all an investigation of the power of Literature, of the ways in which fiction keeps secret what it seems to expose, lies and tells the truth at the same time. Helene Cixous infuses this haunting story of deception with her unique poetic style, incisive wit, and philosophical acumen." -- -Brigitte Weltman-Aron University of Florida "A luminous book. A poignant literary work." -- -Alessia Ricciardi University of California, BerkeleyMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 210 mm
Width: 140 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-8232-2775-4 (9780823227754)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
08/2009
1st Edition
Fordham University Press
€31.99
Available for download
Persons
Helene Cixous is the founder of the first Women's Studies program in France, at the University of Paris VIII. Since 1967, she has published more than fifty "fictions," as well as numerous works of criticism on literature and many essays on the visual arts. She has long been a collaborator with Ariane Mnouchkine at the Theatre du Soleil, and a number of her plays have been published. Her many books include Osnabrueck Station to Jerusalem, "Coming to Writing" and Other Essays, and The Portable Cixous.
Beverley Bie Brahic lives in Paris. She is the translator of Helene Cixous's Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, Dream I Tell You, Reveries of the Wild Woman, and The Day I Wasn't There, and the author of a volume of poems, Against Gravity.
Beverley Bie Brahic lives in Paris. She is the translator of Helene Cixous's Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, Dream I Tell You, Reveries of the Wild Woman, and The Day I Wasn't There, and the author of a volume of poems, Against Gravity.