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Hélène Cixous’s Poetics of Voice: Echo—Subjectivity—Diffraction

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Dr Birgit M. Kaiser (Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Transcultural Aesthetics at Utrecht University, Utrecht University, Netherlands)

Hélène Cixous’s Poetics of Voice

Echo—Subjectivity—Diffraction

Dr Birgit M. Kaiser (Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Transcultural Aesthetics at Utrecht University, Utrecht University, Netherlands)

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English

Bloomsbury Academic
12 December 2024

Literary theory; Literary studies: post-colonial literature; Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers; Feminism & feminist theory

Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Global Women’s Writing

Exploring the poetic fictions of prominent French, feminist writer Hélène Cixous, this open access book highlights rich and timely ideas of selfhood in her work. With careful elaboration of the writer’s relationship with Algeria, Birgit M. Kaiser shows how Cixous reflects on experiences of colonial and patriarchal othering. More than that, she crafts a voice – an autofictive ""I"" – that takes the figure of Echo as a guiding mythology to portray selfhood as diffractive, always already exceeding binary models of self/other that remain central to conceptions of subjectivity. Putting forward the notion of ‘echology’, Kaiser examines how Cixous performs selfhood within ecologies of cohabitation, thereby critiquing and revising key tenets of psychoanalysis and its narrative of the subject.

Drawing from famous texts such as The Laugh of the Medusa, The Newly Born Woman, and The Portrait of Dora, but also more recent titles like Osnabrück, So Close, Death Shall be Dethroned or Cixous's collaborations with Adel Abdessemed, Hélène Cixous's Poetics of Voice: Echo - Subjectivity - Diffraction offers fresh variations on familiar psychoanalytic and semiotic axes, and new ventures into dialogue with feminist new materialisms.

Elegant, politically dynamic and providing exciting news ways into Cixous’s work and poetics, the concept of ‘echology’ lends new perspectives for feminist and postcolonial formations of selfhood and new imaginations of what it means to be human within planetary life.

The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Utrecht University.

By: Dr Birgit M. Kaiser (Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Transcultural Aesthetics at Utrecht University Utrecht University Netherlands)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781350404717
ISBN 10: 1350404713
Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Global Women’s Writing
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 12 December 2024
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Table of Contents Introduction Part I: Voice Chapter 1: Auto-Writing: On Voice in Hélène Cixous Chapter 2: Making Voice: Superposition or the Chorus that “I” is (Reading Cixous with Barad and Trinh) Part II: Feminine Writing Chapter 3: Losing Voice: Medusa’s Head and Dora’s Throat (Cixous Reading Freud) Chapter 4: Ec(h)ological Writing X Écriture Féminine (Reading Cixous with Kirby) Part III: Echology Chapter 5: Primal Scenes: A German-French-Jewish-Algerian Diffraction (Reading Cixous with Derrida and Fanon) Chapter 6: Algerian Pas de Deux: Entanglement and the Almost Inaudible Echoes of Lions (Cixous Reading Abdessemed) Bibliography

Birgit M. Kaiser is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Transcultural Aesthetics at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She has been a visiting researcher at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Paris-Nanterre (April/May 2017) and at the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University, USA. She is co-editor - with Lorna Burns - of Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze (2012) and editor of Singularity and Transnational Poetics (2015) and is author of Figures of Simplicity (2011) and - with Kathrin Thiele - Diffracted Worlds - Diffractive Readings (2018).

Reviews for Hélène Cixous’s Poetics of Voice: Echo—Subjectivity—Diffraction

The book that Anglophone audiences have been waiting for, Hélène Cixous’s Poetics of Voice develops a meticulous and elegant ‘echology’ that offers acute insight into Cixous’s extensive oeuvre. Sallying back and forth across her work, Kaiser details precise connections with a wider field of international scholarship. Savour it. * Lynn Turner, Reader in Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK *