Claire Kahane is a feminist literary critic and memoirist who lives in Berkeley, California. As a young woman propelled by a lust for adventure and the will to challenge the cultural expectations for women, she spent part of the 1950s and 60s on the road, traveling through Mexico, the United States, Europe and Morocco, living a life unusual for a woman of her time. Years later, as a Professor of English at the University at Buffalo, and informed by her study of psychoanalysis, she wrote and edited books and essays which explored gender conflict in modern fiction, the dark appeal of Gothic literature, Holocaust trauma in literature, and more recently, the perverse fictions of Ian McEwan. Her memoir, Nine Lives, testifies to her dynamic re-invention of herself over nine decades. Now a Research Associate with the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley, she continues to write both memoir pieces and literary criticism.
CLAIRE KAHANE 