Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing is a poetic, insightful, and ultimately moving exploration of 'the strange science of writing.' In a magnetic, irresistible narrative, Cixous reflects on the writing process and explores three distinct areas essential for 'great' writing: The School of the Dead―the notion that something or someone must die in order for good writing to be born; The School of Dreams―the crucial role dreams play in literary inspiration and output; and The School of Roots―the importance of depth in the 'nether realms' in all aspects of writing. Cixous's love of language and passion for the written word is evident on every page. Her emotive style draws heavily on the writers she most admires: the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, the Austrian novelists Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, Dostoyevsky and, most of all, Kafka.

Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

Literature & Fiction

Hélène Cixous

History & Criticism

Columbia University Press

This key collection of feminist writing includes essays, works of fiction, lectures and drama, all arranged chronologically. Spanning twenty years, it demonstrates the development of one of the great creative minds of the 20ieth century.

The Hélène Cixous Reader

Routledge

Helene Cixous is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant and innovative contemporary thinkers. Published here in English for the first time Helene Cixous, Rootprints is an ideal introduction to Cixous's theory and her fiction, tracing her development as a writer and intellectual whose remarkable prespicacity and electrifying poetic force are known world-wide. Unprecedented in its form and content this collection breaks new ground in the theory and practice of auto/biography. Cixous's creative reflections on the past provide occasion for scintillating forays into the future. The text includes: * an extended interview between Cixous and Calle-Gruber, exploring Cixous's creative and intellectual processes * a revealing collection of photographs taken from Cixous's family album, set against a poetic reflection by the author * selections from Cixous's private notebooks * a contribution by Jacques Derrida * original 'thing-pieces' by Calle-Gruber.

Hélène Cixous, Rootprints

Mireille Calle-Gruber

Arts & Photography

Text: English, French (translation)

Benmussa Directs: "Portrait of Dora" (Helene Cixous) and "The Singular Life" (Simone Benmussa)

Simone Benmussa

Dramas & Plays

Riverrun Press

Reading With Clarice Lispector

PRENTICE/HALL

Readings: Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector and Tsvetayeva

Love Itself: In the Letter Box

Love's memories, love recalling itself in letters lost and found over an interval of forty years: Cixous's writer-narrator advances here far into a labyrinth of passions long ago delivered and yet still arriving through the mail, through letters and literature, in other words, the poetry of the post. As for the lovers' returning scenes, they have their addresses in Paris (rue Olivier de Serres, Avenue de Choisy, street names that endlessly feed love's unconscious language) and in New York, but also in a lost oasis of the Egyptian desert during the Napoleonic wars, in Athens and along the shores of a great lake centuries ago in the country of myth. The lovers are poets or soldiers, philosophers or students madly in love with poetry and poets. They are as well mermaids or panthers. Panthers? Yes, for it is the passion of the animal that drives all these lovers to bare themselves, and sometimes their claws, before the beloved. Misunderstandings are often, even inevitably the result. Seconded and witnessed by her passionate, truth-telling cats, Cixous's narrator-writer returns unerringly to moments of errancy inflicted on address and language, those errors and faults when love, perhaps, is listening only to itself, without subject or object, lover or beloved, just love itself, l'amour meme, l'amour m'aime, love loving me, in the letter box of memory.

Polity

Philippines

Philippines is Hélène Cixous's reverie or 'true dreaming' which intertwines Freud's uneasy views on telepathy, autobiographical memories conflating Algeria and Paris, childhood and adult life, shared with her brother 'Pete', and literary evocations from Proust and George du Maurier's forgotten novel Peter Ibbetson. Amid telepathic conversations, real or imagined, and life events uncannily answering one another from a distance, Cixous's dense evocative journey ceaselessly 'returns to its starting point' and, like the twin almonds in one shell evoked by the title, reveals intimate, secret bonds between scenes and beings, real and fictional. Its interpretive sharpness delivered with stylistic elegance and candour will make this study typical of Cixous's art, which plies between literature and criticism, appealing not only to scholars and critics interested in psychoanalysis, autobiography and the act of reading, but also to a broader readership captivated by the hallucinatory coincidences between life, dream and fiction, when 'Reality is the dream. The dream is the true reality'.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

A new collection from one of the most famous and influential French theorists. These 15 essays - 6 previously unpublished even in French and 5 published in English for the first time - span nearly 40 years of Cixous' writing. Here, she ranges over literature, philosophy, politics and culture in what she calls her 'autobibliography'.

Volleys of Humanity: Essays 1972-2009

Essays & Correspondence

Edinburgh University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hélène Cixous. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hélène Cixous

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hélène Cixous. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

The Hélène Cixous Reader

Hélène Cixous, Rootprints

Benmussa Directs: "Portrait of Dora" (Helene Cixous) and "The Singular Life" (Simone Benmussa)

Reading With Clarice Lispector

Readings: Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector and Tsvetayeva

Readings: Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector and Tsvetayeva

Love Itself: In the Letter Box

Philippines

Volleys of Humanity: Essays 1972-2009