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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The "German Illusion": Germany and Jewish-German Motifs in Hélène Cixous's Late Work

The "German Illusion": Germany and Jewish-German Motifs in Hélène Cixous's Late Work

Morel, Olivier
Meyer, Imke

Paperback

Series: New Directions in German Studies

Literary Criticism

ISBN13: 9798765107386
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: Jun 26 2025
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.74
Height: 0.60 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

Examines Jewish-German tropes in Hélène Cixous's oeuvre and life and their impact on her work as a feminist, poet, and playwright.

Hélène Cixous is a poet, philosopher, and activist known worldwide for her manifesto on Écriture feminine (feminine writing) and for her influential literary texts, plays, and essays. While the themes were rarely present in her earlier writings, Germany and Jewish-German family figures and topics have significantly informed most of Cixous's late works. Born in Algeria in June 1937, she grew up with a mother who had escaped Germany after the rise of Nazism and a grandmother who fled the racial laws of the Third Reich in 1938. In her writing, Cixous refines the primitive scene of a German upbringing in French-occupied colonial, antisemitic Algeria.

Scholar and filmmaker Olivier Morel delves into the signs and influences that Germany, German, and Osnabrück have exerted over Cixous's work. Featuring an exclusive interview with Hélène Cixous and stills from their travel together to Osnabrück in Morel's 2018 documentary, Ever, Rêve, Hélène Cixous, Morel's The German Illusion examines the unique literary meditation on the Holocaust sustained throughout her later texts.

Morel helps us to understand an uncannily original oeuvre that embodies the complexities of modernity's genocidal history in a new way.

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