Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Hélène Cixous
Standard Name: Cixous, Hélène
Used Form: Helene Cixous
Married Name: Hélène Berger
HC
, a French writer and academic, is best known to English-speaking audiences as a literary critic associated with French feminism of the 1970s and 80s, and as proponent of écriture féminine. She herself does not respect the distinctions between fiction, criticism, poetry, memoir, and other genres, and often blurs and blends them. Her writing set[s] up a relation of rivalry between poetry and theory
Conley, Verena Andermatt. Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine. University of Nebraska Press, 1991.
xii
—though she engages with the ideas of deconstructionist thinkers such as Jacques Derrida
and Jacques Lacan
, poetic freedom is, for her, ultimately the most important consideration. She is a prolific writer of fiction (ten novels alone), drama and poetry, as well as criticism and memoirs, mostly in French. Only a selection of her most important works is treated here.
"Hélène Cixous" Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne_Cixous_par_Claude_Truong-Ngoc_2011.jpg.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.
First translated into English in Signs in autumn 1981, it was assigned to the final position (in Alice Jardine
's and Harry Blake
's version) in The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics...
Intertextuality and Influence
Alison Fell
Four epigraphs include one each from Julia Kristeva
and Hélène Cixous
.
AF
's introduction begins with the ancient Egyptians, who, she says, first attributed women's vagaries to a womb wandering out of its...
Intertextuality and Influence
Deborah Levy
DL
quotes Hélène Cixous
for her epigraph to the novel: It's up to you to break the old circuits.
Levy, Deborah. Hot Milk. Hamish Hamilton, 2016.
prelims
Her protagonist, a young English woman named Sofia Papastergiadis (her father having been Greek), has...
Literary responses
Christine Brooke-Rose
CBR
mentioned her non-use of to be in this novel to nobody but Hélène Cixous
, who was writing an article on Brooke-Rose for Le Monde. Having done this she was surprised to find...
Occupation
Christine Brooke-Rose
On the invitation of Hélène Cixous
, CBR
taught American Literature and Literary Theory at the new Université de Paris VIII
at Vincennes, first as a Maître de Conferences or lecturer, then as Professor.
Birch, Sarah. Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction. Clarendon Press, 1994.
228
Textual Features
Dorothy Richardson
In addition to her chosen themes, DR
also charts the development of female consciousness through her literary techniques, which strongly disrupt gender, generic, and linguistic conventions. In her 1938 foreword to Pilgrimage, she recalls...
Textual Features
Ali Smith
Reviewer Sophie Ratcliffe
observed an overarching tree motif in the volume, with May featuring a character who falls in love with a tree and The Shortlist Season seeing a visitor to an art gallery being...
Textual Features
Ali Smith
Ultimately, AS
produced a work she describes as a nasty warring book, a book of two sides.
Murray, Isobel, editor. “Ali Smith”. Scottish Writers Talking 3, John Donald, 2006, pp. 186 -29.
222
Like comprises the respective narratives of two women whose formerly close relationship has been destroyed by the...
Textual Production
Sally Purcell
SP
published a prose translation from Hélène Cixous
: The Exile of James Joyce.
“Bowker’s Global Books in Print”. globalbooksinprint.com.
Jay, Peter, and Sally Purcell. “Foreword and Note on the Text”. Collected Poems, edited by Peter Jay and Peter Jay, Anvil Press Poetry, 2002, pp. 19 -24.