Primal Scenes is concerned with those elements in the thought of Freud and Heidegger which make us continue to regard them as our contemporaries. It seeks to reassert their radical potential, which, the author believes, has been minimized as as critics celebrate the radicality of Lacan, Derrida, and others.

Primal Scenes is concerned with those elements in the thought of Freud and Heidegger which make us continue to regard them as our contemporaries. It seeks to reassert their radical potential, which, the author believes, has been minimized as as critics celebrate the radicality of Lacan, Derrida, and others.

"Born to an Algerian-French father and a German mother, both Jews, Helene Cixous experienced a childhood fraught with racial and gender crises. In this moving story she recounts how small domestic events - a new dog, the gift of a bicycle - reverberate decades later with social and psychological meaning. The story's protagonist, whose life resembles that of the author, endures a double alienation: from Algerians because she is French and from the French because she is Jewish. The isolation and exclusion Cixous and her family feel, especially under the Vichy government and during the Algerian War of independence, underpin this heartbreaking but also warmly human and often funny story. The author-narrator concedes that memories of Algeria awaken in her longings for the sights, sounds, and smells of her home country and ponders how that stormy relationship has influenced her life and thought. A meditation on postcolonial identity and gender, Reveries of the Wild Woman is also a poignant recollection of how childhood is author to the woman."--BOOK JACKET.

This collection of contemporary criticism explores her concern with racial and gender issues and analyzes her in relation to other major modern authors, her philosophical and religious speculations, and her preoccupation with the process of fiction-making. These classics provide a broad look at critical argument about Toni Morrison's meanings and significance during the past 10 years. From the formative effects of learning one's Otherness as a result of majority perception, to the apocalyptic implications of racial memory, to the moral and psychologically constructive act of storytelling, to the structural function served by improvisational jazz music, to the imagery associated with both flight and naming, to the uniquely female experience of community-major issues raised by Morrison's body of work are explicated here.

"Novel about a young black girl coming of age in Philadelphia in the late '80s and early '90s"--

This essential reference book is must reading for mental health professionals who assess and treat children and adolescents. Comprehensive, detailed, clearly written, and innovative, it presents the approaches of the leading clinicians in their fields.

The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia. His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted. Out of the shambles of his childhood, he has constructed a new life—marriage to an adoring girl who gives him a son of his own, and a career in scholarship. It is a life that enrages him. In the silence of the library at Columbia University, where he is supposedly writing a Ph.D. dissertation, Daniel composes something quite different. It is a confession of his most intimate relationships—with his wife, his foster parents, and his kid sister Susan, whose own radicalism so reproaches him. It is a book of memories: riding a bus with his parents to the ill-fated Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill; watching the FBI take his father away; appearing with Susan at rallies protesting their parents’ innocence; visiting his mother and father in the Death House. It is a book of investigation: transcribing Daniel’s interviews with people who knew his parents, or who knew about them; and logging his strange researches and discoveries in the library stacks. It is a book of judgments of everyone involved in the case—lawyers, police, informers, friends, and the Isaacson family itself. It is a book rich in characters, from elderly grand- mothers of immigrant culture, to covert radicals of the McCarthy era, to hippie marchers on the Pen-tagon. It is a book that spans the quarter-century of American life since World War II. It is a book about the nature of Left politics in this country—its sacrificial rites, its peculiar cruelties, its humility, its bitterness. It is a book about some of the beautiful and terrible feelings of childhood. It is about the nature of guilt and innocence, and about the relations of people to nations. It is The Book of Daniel.