This book provides a wide-ranging and up-to-date critical introduction to the writings of Helene Cixous (1937-), focusing on key motifs, such as dreams, the supernatural, literature, psychoanalysis, creative writing, realism, sexual differences, laughter, secrets, the 'Mother unconscious', drawing, painting, life writing, telephones, non-human animals, telepathy and the 'art of cutting'. There are close readings of Shakespeare, Bronte, Shelley, Poe, Carroll, Freud, Woolf, Joyce, Beckett and Derrida, for example, alongside in-depth explorations of her own writings, from Inside (1969) and 'The Laugh of the Medusa' (1975) up to the present. Royle's book will be useful to students and academics coming to Cixous's work for the first time, but it will also appeal to readers interested in contemporary literature, creative writing, life writing, narrative theory, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, trauma studies, feminism, queer theory, ecology, drawing and painting. -- .
Table of Contents:
1 Introduction: dreamer, realist, analyst, writing
2 Cixous cuts: through everything
3 Advertisement: the joys of literature and the return of the dead
4 Cixous cuts: take time
5 Dream in literature
6 Cixous cuts: from the axe to giving birth
7 Away
8 Cixous cuts: the veil in me
9 Portmanteau
10 Cixous cuts: Lewis Carroll
11 To awake, Shakespeare of the Night
12 Dream treatment: on sitting down to read a letter from Freud
13 Side thinking
14 All wards
15 Four words for Cixous
16 The one time Hélène Cixous entered my garden
Index of works by Cixous
General index
