TY  - BOOK
AU  - Cixous,Hélène
AU  - Kamuf,Peggy
TI  - Mother Homer is Dead
T2  - The Frontiers of Theory : FRTH
SN  - 9781474425117
AV  - PQ2663.I9 Z47715 2018
U1  - 844/.914 
PY  - 2022///]
CY  - Edinburgh : 
PB  - Edinburgh University Press, 
KW  - Authors, French
KW  - 20th century
KW  - Biography
KW  - 21st century
KW  - Mothers of authors
KW  - France
KW  - Death
KW  - Literary Studies
KW  - LITERARY CRITICISM / European / French
KW  - bisacsh
N1  - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Series Editor’s Preface --; Prologue --; The Very Long Journey: Notebooks 10–12 --; Introduction --; The Beautiful Summer of 2011 --; The Anger of the Scamander --; She Comes Back to Arcachon --; 17 July 2013 --; 27 July 2013; restricted access
N2  - Hélène Cixous chronicles the last six months of her mother’s life, transgressing the mother-daughter relation in the experience of dyingMother Homer is Dead was written in the immediate aftermath of the death of the writer’s mother in the 103rd year of her life. Ève Cixous, née Klein, has figured centrally in her daughter’s writing since the publication of Osnabrück (1999). Since then, Cixous’s work has turned in ever-tighter orbits around the relation to her mother’s life as it tapers down toward death. The writer discovers a guide book for the task written in her mother’s own hand, where the narrator comes to realise that she will have been midwife to her mother’s death. In French, this substitutability or reversibility of birth and death is facilitated by the noun accouchement, childbirth or labour, but which literally says ‘bedding, putting or going to bed’. The reversal also concerns the positions of mother/child. What is happening requires the child to become the mother of the mother. How then must she hear her child’s repeated cry of ‘Help me, help me’? Is it help dying that she wants? And how to know this is indeed her desire? The narrator/writer, when in doubt, opts always for life, for more life for her mother, but to the point that many of those around her—family, friends, doctors, nurses—warn that she has lost touch with ‘reality’. Perhaps never has the agony of letting go of the dying one been so unflinchingly rendered. Cixous’s exquisitely poetic prose has also never been put to a more harrowing test of its inventive capacities. Key FeaturesThe first translation into EnglishPrimary text by a celebrated French author and intellectualExtraordinary account of the experience of death and coping with bereavement
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474425131
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781474425131
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9781474425131/original
ER  -