Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory
by Hélène Cixous
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"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 show more 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"-- show lessTags
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In-love-in-anguish you really feel that (had you known) you could never had never loved the being you-love-forever, all along you feel love threatening you, but you don't know it. The more you feel, the more instinctively you ward it off by increasing the love therefore the anguish.
It would be unwise to call it a health scare. My experience earlier this week was nevertheless a novel one. I awoke in the night and my body didn't feel right. My imagination soon colored between the lines. I read nearly all of this at the doctor's office. Physically I think I'm fine. I'm glad I had Cixous to lean on there. This masterful work concerns Cixous' time in the States in 1964-65. Her journey appears in the refracted lens of memory to be from show more library to library. She met someone at the Beinecke at Yale, the bond was one of letters, one of possibility. Her faded thoughts collect and gather, the mold of time and other loss leads to further association and puns. The floating theme appears to be Loss. It is a bold editorial decision, there are no footnotes, so the reader is free to race and revel. I am glad I did. show less
It would be unwise to call it a health scare. My experience earlier this week was nevertheless a novel one. I awoke in the night and my body didn't feel right. My imagination soon colored between the lines. I read nearly all of this at the doctor's office. Physically I think I'm fine. I'm glad I had Cixous to lean on there. This masterful work concerns Cixous' time in the States in 1964-65. Her journey appears in the refracted lens of memory to be from show more library to library. She met someone at the Beinecke at Yale, the bond was one of letters, one of possibility. Her faded thoughts collect and gather, the mold of time and other loss leads to further association and puns. The floating theme appears to be Loss. It is a bold editorial decision, there are no footnotes, so the reader is free to race and revel. I am glad I did. show less
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Author Information
140+ Works 2,417 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, General Fiction
- DDC/MDS
- 848.91409 — Literature & rhetoric French Literature French miscellaneous writings 1900- 1900-1999 1945-1999 Individual authors
- LCC
- PQ2663 .I9 .Z4613 — Language and Literature French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese literatures French literature Modern literature 1961-2000
- BISAC
Statistics
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- 30
- Popularity
- 929,612
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.20)
- Languages
- English, French
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 9
- ASINs
- 1
