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.
Les mer
Born in Oran, Algeria, Helene Cixous spent her childhood in France's former colony. This work is her visceral memoir of a preadolescence that shaped her with intense feelings of alienation, yet also contributed to her development as a writer and philosopher.
Les mer
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780810118720
Publisert
2002-10-31
Utgiver
Vendor
Northwestern University Press
Høyde
216 mm
Bredde
140 mm
Aldersnivå
05, 06, 01, UU, UP, P, G
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
128
Forfatter
Oversetter