A01=Helene Cixous
American
Author_Helene Cixous
avant garde
Category=DNBL1
Category=DSBH
Category=DSK
critical theory
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
European
literature
memoir
modernism
modernist
poetry
theory
twentieth century
Product details
- ISBN 9780810123632
- Weight: 169g
- Dimensions: 154 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 30 May 2006
- Publisher: Northwestern University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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All the time when I lived in Algeria, my native country, I dreamt of one day arriving in Algeria. Born in Oran, Algeria, Helene Cixous spent her childhood in France's former colony. ""Reveries of the Wild Woman"" is her visceral memoir of a preadolescence that shaped her with intense feelings of alienation, yet also contributed, in a paradoxically essential way, to her development as a writer and philosopher. Born to a French father and an Austro-German mother, both Jews, Cixous experienced a childhood fraught with racial and gender crisis. In her moving story she recounts how small events - a new dog, the gift of a bicycle - reverberate decades later as symbols filled with social and psychological meaning. She and her family endure a double alienation, by Algerians for being French and by the French for being Jewish, and Cixous builds her story on the themes of isolation and exclusion she felt in particular under the Vichy government and during the Algerian Civil War. Yet she also concedes that memories of Algeria awaken in her a longing for her home country, and ponders how that stormy relationship has influenced her life and thought. A meditation on postcolonial identity and gender, ""Reveries of the Wild Woman"" is also a poignant recollection of how a girl's childhood is, indeed, author to the woman.
