The Portable Cixous.

Helene Cixous is one of the twentieth century's most influential theorists, genre-defying writers, and groundbreaking playwrights. Her work has been translated into almost a dozen languages and touches on every facet of our lives& mdash;dreams, sex, relationships, identity, our conception of reality, and our attempts at defining the self. As her close companion Jacques Derrida once pointed out, however, a "profound misunderstanding" of Cixous persists among her fans. Many readers know little of her work beyond theoretical texts and miss out on the innovator's idiosyncratic mix of autobiographical and fictional narrative combined with philosophical and poetic reflections.Providing a truly liberal selection of Cixous's writings from throughout the intellectual's career, Marta Segarra rediscovers Cixous's remarkable acts of invention for a new generation. Divided into six thematic parts (writing and dreaming in the feminine, Algeria and Germany, love and the other, the animal, Derrida, and the theater of Helene Cixous), with critical essays introducing each group, this anthology fully captures Cixous's genius for merging fiction, theory, and living in her writing. Her work defies classification and locks literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis into thrilling new patterns of engagement. Whether readers are familiar with Cixous's work or are approaching her for the first time, all will find fascinating new perspectives on gender, fiction, theater, theory, and Jewish and postcolonial identities.

About the Author
Marta Segarra is professor of French studies and feminist theory and director of the Center for Women and Literature at the University of Barcelona. She is also associate scholar of the Centre de recherche en etudes feminines at the University of Paris 8, where she teaches in a program founded by Helene Cixous.