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    Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory
    Unavailable
    Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory
    Unavailable
    Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory
    Ebook201 pages4 hours

    Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory

    By Hélène Cixous

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    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 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, as Jacques Derrida writes, “a counterfeit genius.”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFordham University Press
    Release dateAug 25, 2009
    ISBN9780823217625
    Unavailable
    Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory
    Author

    Hélène Cixous

    Hélène Cixous is the founder of the first Women’s Studies program in France, at the University of Paris VIII. Since 1967, she has published more than fifty “fictions,” as well as numerous works of criticism on literature and many essays on the visual arts. She has long been a collaborator with Ariane Mnouchkine at the Théâtre du Soleil, and a number of her plays have been published. Her many books include Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem, "Coming to Writing" and Other Essays, and The Portable Cixous.

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    Reviews for Manhattan

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    • 4/5
      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 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.