Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva offers striking and novel textual studies of major literary figures and emergent authors. Selected from Cixouss seminars taught between 1980 and 1986 at the Universite de Paris VII (Saint-Denis) and at the College International de Philosophie, the texts chronicle the French intellectual scene with its shifting tastes over the decade following May 1986.

In their simple and accessible language, the texts can be read as inspiration for Cixouss fictional and critical practices. They not only introduce readers to emergent texts from Brazil and Russia, such as Clarice Lispectors Foreign Legion and Marina Tsvetayevas Mother and Music, but also give new, incisive insights into Joyces Portrait of the Artist and Kafkas Before the Law. Drawing from philosophy and psychoanalysis, Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva can be read side-by-side with Reading with Clarice Lispector, as an ongoing meditation on ethics and poetics.

Also from Minnesota

Reading with Clarice Lispector

Helene Cixous

Edited, translated, and introduced by Verena Andermatt Conley

For Cixous, Lispectors work represents one of the finest examples of ecriture feminine in that she practices, in writing, what Cixous is searching for in her theoretical practice: the giving, spending, and inscribing of pleasure; an apprenticeship in the lessons of life.

Theory and History of Literature, volume 73