A sustained encounter between two writers for whom language is, well, everything.

In Reading with Clarice Lispector, Hélène Cixous moves through Lispector’s fiction following (or being swept by) its movements: birth, freedom, naming, death, love, animals, repetition, the body, and the everything that creates an instability of the self.

Drawing on works including Água Viva, The Apple in the Dark and The Hour of the Star, Cixous analyses Lispector's loops, hesitatations, returns and watch them untangle and re-tangle. She finds the meaning appears in the act of writing rather than waiting beforehand to be expressed. The result is literary criticism that becomes almost collaborative — part close reading, part philosophy of writing, part meditation on what happens when language approaches experiences it cannot comfortably contain.

A particularly rich book for readers interested in Lispector, Cixous, feminist theory, écriture féminine, embodiment and experimental literature.

University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1990. First edition. Theory and History of Literature, Volume 73. Paperback. Light shelf wear and minor rubbing to covers; slight edge and corner wear. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Very good condition.