Acerca de este artículo

Product Identifiers

PublisherSeagull Books

ISBN-101803090596

ISBN-139781803090597

eBay Product ID (ePID)26057289292

Product Key Features

Book TitleWell-Kept Ruins

Number of Pages156 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2022

TopicGeneral, Jewish

IllustratorYes

GenreLiterary Criticism, History

AuthorHélène Cixous

Book SeriesThe French List Ser.

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height0.8 in

Item Weight13 Oz

Item Length9 in

Item Width6 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN2024-356121

Reviews Well-Kept Ruins is at once a memoir, a history, and a work of philosophical theory -- as [Cixous] seeks forms of writing to describe the embodied and inherited traumas of the 20th century., Well-Kept Ruins is shaped by a yearning to recover the irrecuperable. Cixous is compelled to revisit the fates of these castaways. She is a daughter who attempts to commemorate a midwife; a writer who finds herself through the bond of mother and child. . . . Cixous's book is a genealogy of exile., One of Cixous' imperatives is that writing should always act against finality, against death; now, with that most difficult and ungathered subject, she evokes that power., To read Cixous here is to feel oneself pulled along, engulfed, really, amid a torrent of words, a cascade of sentences, as if one has drifted inside of a tumbling, beautiful, confusing, dream. A reader, too, must let go, must allow that we will not always know which of the book's many voices are speaking, that we cannot always be sure where we are in time and space. The point was never to be so securely fastened, and anyway, such a condition is impossible, for Cixous at least., This welcome translation gives us a Cixous still energetically writing the self, and other selves--this time with imperative retrospect., Woven throughout is a meditation on the life of Cixous's mother and the ineffability of another's interior life and experience. . . Recommended., Well-Kept Ruins turns inward, toward the personal sense of a present wonderfully and terribly ruptured by the past.

Table Of Content1.To the Centre of the Centre of the World 2.Reconstitutions 3.Plötzlich--Suddenly a Photograph 4.Well-Kept Tales--Prisons 5.Salt in the Soup 6.In the Suitcase

SynopsisA genre-defying book from one of France's most well-known philosopher-writers. In the Lower Saxony region of northwestern Germany sits the city of Osnabrück. This is where, in 1648, the Peace of Westphalia was signed, bringing the Thirty Years' War and one of the most calamitous periods of European history to an end. But the city was later to witness another calamity. Today, as one walks through Old Synagogue Street in a rich neighborhood of Osnabrück, one might miss noticing a pile of pale stones held together by chicken wire that sits between two fashionable homes. These are the well-kept ruins from behind which stares a gaping space--a place of memory and oblivion. Four polished plaques tell the tale of the horror-filled night of November 9, 1938--today known as Kristallnacht--when the synagogue that had stood on this spot was desecrated, looted, set on fire, and eventually demolished by Hitler's forces. On the same day, ninety parishioners were imprisoned by the Gestapo and eventually sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Osnabrück was also home to Eve Klein, a member of the city's early-twentieth-century Jewish community and the mother of author Hélène Cixous. In Well-Kept Ruins , Cixous returns to the historic city in 2019 and reflects on the remains of the synagogue that "express the life lost, the life kept." Walking the streets of the city, plumbing the depths of the past along with her own family's history, looking deep into the future, and punctuating her poetic prose with haunting photographs, Cixous explores the ruins at the heart of humanity. Part memoir, part philosophical meditation, Well-Kept Ruins is a genre-defying and timely reflection of the contemporary human condition., ... and while we crossed Cathedral Square walking faster and faster, as if we were, my mother and I, automobiles that recall being horses back when my mother was the child skipping across the street in front of the Dom in front of the Osnabrück mayor's calèche, I hear, I think, a crowd or several crowds shouting violent words in the transparent air of the very pretty, very calm streets that raced, still empty still shining, this morning down towards the river. Words howling death. Book jacket.

LC Classification NumberPQ2663.I9