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Understanding Cixous, Understanding Modernism

Professor Peggy Kamuf editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Publishing:8th Jan '26

£90.00

This title is due to be published on 8th January, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Understanding Cixous, Understanding Modernism cover

Explores and illuminates the impact of French theorist, writer, and critic Hélène Cixous on our understanding of literary modernism.

Hélène Cixous is well-known as a reader of ‘modernist’ writers: Joyce, Beckett, Kafka, Faulkner, Bachmann and others, while her own fiction writing forges many new directions in literature.

Foremost readers of the work of Hélène Cixous consider new interpretations of her vast literary and theoretical work, examining its relation and non-relation to modernism. Understanding Cixous, Understanding Modernism features an extended new interview with Cixous, conducted for the volume, in which she reflects on her relation to the critical category of 'modernism,' alongside a previously untranslated piece by the author.

As with other volumes in the series, Understanding Cixous, Understanding Modernism follows a three-part structure. Essays in the first section examine individual works by Cixous and the varied approaches her work has taken towards literature and art. The second section examines critical and aesthetic parameters of her writing practices. The final section contains a glossary of key terms and Cixous's neologisms recurrent throughout her work.

An icon of French feminism, Hélène Cixous posed a major challenge to philosophy: Could it be anti-phallocentric, anti-patriarchal, and still be called philosophy? Cixous changed the terms of philosophical discourse by gendering and writing it differently, crafting an idiom of language-in-translation marked by displacements, hauntings, and scars of loss. This comprehensive volume, with its
distinguished line-up of Cixous readers, conveys the historic importance of a major figure of modernist thought; one who stands with the great authors of literary modernism (Joyce, Kafka, Bachmann, Lispector) on whom Cixous draws for her own experimental forays in transgenre.

* Emily Apter, Julius Silver Professor of Comparative Literature and French Literature, Thought, and Culture, New York University, USA *
Understanding Cixous, Understanding Modernism is clever in its composition, at once profound and playful, bringing novelty to analyses that highlight the breadth and the brilliance of Hélène Cixous’s immense corpus. * Alison Rice, Dr. William M. Scholl Professor of French and Francophone Studies, University of Notre Dame, U

ISBN: 9798765132036

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

288 pages