Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kakfa, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva (Theory and History of Literature) [Paperback]

Helene Cixous (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Well known here as well as at home in France as a leader in the feminist intellectual movement, Cixous exhibits thought and writing strong enough to make Readings --the transcription of seminar notes--both readable and highly informative. Cixous's admiration for Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector places her work at the center of this comparative analysis, but the other writers of the title (as well as Kleist and Celan) receive fair illumination by her reading lamp. This volume's specialist orientation requires scholarly readers, but those in several fields--literature, history, and the social sciences--will be well served by acquainting themselves with it. See also Cixous's "Coming to Writing" and Other Essays , reviewed above.--Ed.
- Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1 edition (September 17, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816619417
• ISBN-13: 978-0816619412
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #766,614 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4.0 out of 5 stars from seminars in Paris in 1980 through 1986, December 26, 2011

By 

Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kakfa, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva (Theory and History of Literature) (Paperback)

Mental bankruptcy in a culture of loss. We don't have the paradise that Adam and Eve had in the Garden of Eden because there was no way for them to know about evil until they had eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Cixous gives readings of stories that involve a fall from innocence and explains grace as a momentary experience, not a possession that anyone can retain. The desire for innocence as a character trait does not conform to times, people, or places we experience.

This book uses the Yid word when Cixous is not satisfied with a translation of "Poem of the End" by Tsvetayeva.

Would it be more equal for one person to use the Yid word or for everyone to use the Yid word? The poem asks about being forbidden:

Life is a place where it's forbidden
to live. Like the Hebrew quarter. (p. 149).

Life is for converts only
Judases of all faiths. (p. 150).

Her association of poet and Jew -
she actually uses the term "Yid" (p. 150).

Law is a form of oppression when it is being used to make some poor wretched fool to pay. Kleist's story "Michael Kohlhaas," makes it perfectly clear:

At that moment Kohlhaas has a
premonition. He knows before
really knowing and starts on a
slow fall. His knowledge of law is
insufficient for a social being.
He has not understood yet that
the law does not forgive. He still
believes that law and justice go
together and that one can ask the law,
like the Father - since we are entering
afterward in infinite relays of figures
of the law, imperial, regal - for something
that, in reality, it will never be able to give.
One can ask something legitimate of it but
not something just. That is going to be
Kohlhaas's experience. This alteration
takes place over a thousand steps. (p. 59).

One of the readings is phrased as a question in the text being read:

we would have to eat again
of the Tree of Knowledge
in order to return to the state
of innocence? (p. 49).

The analysis involves a pendulum. On one side is joy and thirst, which then moves to loss within a context of distraction, division, separation and gaps of displacement. "The expression itself is obscure and escapes the reader's perception or appropriation." (p. 50). When it is all over, they are on the side of admiration admiring itself.

"Until everything transformed itself into denial." (p. 51).

"The wasteland of waiting has already disconnected the wires." (p. 51).