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Showing 1 - 4 of
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We Defy Augury (Hardcover)
Hélène Cixous; Translated by Beverley Bie Brahic
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R546
Discovery Miles 5 460
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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We defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a
sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come … the readiness is all.
Under the sign of Hamlet’s last act, Hélène Cixous, in her
eightieth year, launched her new book—and the latest chapter in
her Human Comedy, her Search for Lost Time. Surely one of the most
delightful, in its exposure of the seams of her extraordinary
craft, We Defy Augury finds the reader among familiar faces. In
these pages we encounter Eve, the indomitable mother; Jacques
Derrida, the faithful friend; children, neighbors; and always the
literary forebears: Montaigne, Diderot, Proust, and, in one moving
passage, Erich Maria Remarque. We Defy Augury moves easily from
Cixous’s Algerian childhood, to Bacharach in the Rhineland, to,
eerily, the Windows on the World restaurant atop the World Trade
Center, in the year 2000. In one of the most astonishing passages
in this tour-de-force performance of the art of digression, Cixous
proclaims: “My books are free in their movements and in their
choice of routes […] They are the product of many makers,
dreamed, dictated, cobbled together.” This unique experience,
which could only have come from the pen of Cixous, is now available
in English, and readers are sure to delight in this latest work by
one of France’s most celebrated writer-philosophers.
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 a counterfeit genius.
An inventive literary account of Cixous’s remarkable journey to
her mother’s birthplace Winner, French Voices Award for
Excellence in Publication and Translation For about eighty years,
the Jonas family of Osnabrück were part of a small but vibrant
Jewish community in this mid-size city of Lower Saxony. After the
war, Osnabrück counted not a single Jew. Most had been deported
and murdered in the camps, others emigrated if they could and if
they managed to overcome their own inertia. It is this inertia and
failure to escape that Hélène Cixous seeks to account for in
Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem. Vicious anti-Semitism hounded all
of Osnabrück’s Jews long before the Nazis’ rise to power in
1933. So why did people wait to leave when the threat was so
patent, so in-their-face? Drawn from the stories told to Cixous by
her mother, Ève, and grandmother, Rosalie (Rosi), this literary
work reimagines fragments of Ève’s and Rosi’s stories,
including the death of Ève’s uncle, Onkel André. Piecing
together the story of Andreas Jonas from what she was told and from
what she envisages, Cixous recounts the tragedy of the one she
calls the King Lear of Osnabrück, who followed his daughter to
Jerusalem only to be sent away by her and to return to Osnabrück
in time to be deported to a death camp. Cixous wanders the streets
of the city she had heard about all her life in her mother’s and
grandmother’s stories, digs into its archives, meets city
officials, all the while wondering if she should have come. These
hesitations and reflections in the present, often voiced in
dialogues staged with her own son or daughter, are woven with
scenes from her childhood in Algeria and the half-remembered,
half-invented stories of the Jonas family, making Osnabrück
Station to Jerusalem one of the author’s most intensely engaging
books. This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in
publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and
funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French
American Cultural Exchange).
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Camille Henrot: Mother Tongue
Julika Bosch, Hélène Cixous, Seamus Kealy, Emily LaBarge, Legacy Russell, …
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R1,257
Discovery Miles 12 570
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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“IN MANY LANGUAGES, ‘UNDERSTANDING’ ALSO COMES FROM THE IDEA
OF PUTTING SOMETHING INSIDE YOUR BODY” – CAMILLE HENROT Over
the past twenty years, Camille Henrot has developed a critically
acclaimed practice that moves seamlessly between drawing, painting,
sculpture, installation, and film. Mother Tongue is Henrot’s
first publication focused solely on painting and drawing, bringing
together over 200 works from the series System of Attachment, Wet
Job, and Soon, created between 2018 and 2022. This recent body of
work addresses the ambivalent nature of care and the tension
between the simultaneous developmental need for attachment and
independence, beginning at infancy and continuing throughout life.
Her deeply personal and intimate interrogations ultimately relate
to broader questions such as the expectations placed on mothers and
the representation of the female body. This richly illustrated
catalogue is accompanied by texts from Emily LaBarge, Legacy
Russell, Marcus Steinweg, Hélene Cixous, Seamus Kealy, and a
conversation with Camille Henrot and curator Julika Bosch.
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