| Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory Contributor(s): Cixous, Hélène (Author), Brahic, Beverley Bie (Translator) |
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ISBN: 0823227766 ISBN-13: 9780823227761 Publisher: Fordham University Press OUR PRICE: $40.95 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: December 2007 * Not available - Not in print at this time *Annotation: 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 Beinecke and a mysterious and never-again-to-be-found hotel in the vicinity of the Columbia University campus are its principal locations. 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." |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Biography & Autobiography | Literary Figures - Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs |
| Dewey: B |
| LCCN: 2007042850 |
| Physical Information: 0.6" H x 5.56" W x 8.52" (0.61 lbs) 190 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - French - Chronological Period - 1960's - Locality - New York, N.Y. - Geographic Orientation - New York - Cultural Region - Mid-Atlantic - Cultural Region - Northeast U.S. |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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-otherseductions of literature; a family's flight from NaziGermany and postcolonial Algeria; childhood, motherhood, and, not least, the strange experience of falling in love with, as Jacques Derrida writes, a counterfeit genius. |
Contributor Bio(s): Brahic, Beverley Bie: - BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC lives in Paris. She is the translator of Hélène Cixous's Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, Dream I Tell You, Reveries of the Wild Woman, and The Day I Wasn't There, and the author of a volume of poems, Against Gravity.Cixous, Helene: - 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 "Coming to Writing" and Other Essays and The Portable Cixous. |