Hélène Cixous: Dreamer, Realist, Analyst, Writing

Nicholas Royle's funny, insightful,elegant, erudite book is not only a creative and thought-provoking, highlysensitive reading of Cixous's literary oeuvre, but is also - to adopt the idiomshared by Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida - a ULO (unidentifiable literaryobject) in its own right. Royle's book both introduces theEnglish-language reader to the distinctive pleasures of Cixous's inventivewriting and takes the reader on an exhilarating linguistic adventure thatreveals how apparently ordinary English words contain secret treasures andstartling insights. Elissa Marder, Emory University At once expository and playful, original and funny, NicholasRoyle's micrological approach to the work of Hélène Cixous enables a new critical understanding andappreciation of her writing. If there is complexity in her work, Roylesuggests, there is also uncanny simplicity and great pleasure. The book focuseson key motifs such as dreams, the supernatural, psychoanalysis, creative writing,realism, sexual differences, laughter, secrets, the 'Mother unconscious',drawing, painting, autobiography as 'double life writing', telephones,non-human animals, telepathy and the 'art of cutting'. Particular stress isgiven to Cixous's work in relation to Freud and Derrida, as well as to herimportance in the context of 'English literature'. There are close readings ofShakespeare, Emily Brontë, P. B. Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll,Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, for example, alongside in-depthexplorations of her own writings, from Inside (1969) up to the present. Royle's book will be of particular interest to readerscoming to Cixous's work for the first time, but it will also appeal to readersinterested in contemporary literature, creative writing, life writing,narrative theory, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, trauma studies, feminism,queer theory, ecology, drawing and painting.