First Days of the Year (Emergent Literatures Series)
by Helene Cixous
30 Members (4.00)
On This Page
Description
A searching meditation on "authorship" by an eminent theorist.An inner journey across space and time linking the "author" to other poets, this lyrical essay-poem continues Helene Cixous's exhilarating rewriting of notions of boundary, self, other, and author. The renowned source of the notion of ecriture feminine, Cixous here interrogates the status of the author, connecting distant instances of herself with other writers who traverse genders, generations, and national boundaries. In doing show more so, she pursues the rhythms of a mind thinking, tentatively following each thought from its enigmatic inception through all its twists and turns into the next thought's mysterious beginnings. Here, then, is the "flux full of silent words flowing from one community to the other, from one life to the other, the strange legend, inaudible except to the heart of one or the other, the narrative weaving itself on high". By turns thrilling and chimerical, hypnotic and startling, this first-person meditation -- or, in Freud's term for a dream-text, theorie-fiction -- does not aspire to reflect reality so much as transform the ways in which we perceive it, creating new terms for subjectivity and the "real". Above all, First Days of the Year (published originally in French as Jours de l'an) is a celebration of beginnings and future possibilities, based on necessity and hope, constantly mediating writing and living, life and death. Like all of Cixous's profoundly original works, it seductively leads the reader into a new way of thinking by disrupting fixed ideas of psychic identity, subjectivity, and language. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
Members
- Recently Added By
Author Information
140+ Works 2,414 Members
Born in 1937 in Algeria, Helene Cixous came to Paris, where she is currently professor of English, in 1955. After a dissertation on James Joyce, The Exile of James Joyce (1968), she began to publish novels, critical essays, and plays, most notably Le Portrait de Dora (1976), a feminist retelling of a Freudian case history. Jacques Derrida has show more named Helene Cixous the greatest contemporary French writer. Cixous has been an active participant in the development of literary criticism after structuralism and has been a leading figure in the French feminist movement. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, Literature Studies and Criticism
- DDC/MDS
- 843.914 — Literature & rhetoric French Literature French fiction 1900- 20th Century 1945-1999
- LCC
- PQ2663 .I9 .J6813 — Language and Literature French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese literatures French literature Modern literature 1961-2000
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 30
- Popularity
- 929,561
- Rating
- (4.00)
- Languages
- English, French
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 3
