Title: Hélène Cixous
First published: 1996
Description: Helene Cixous has made her literary mark with a style that is a mixture of poetry and philosophical reflection. Her intensely personal works are characterized by a masterful intertwining of language and subject matter, linking concepts through phoneme relationships, leitmotivs, and adept wordplay. Although Cixous has produced more than 40 volumes of writing from 1967 to 1991, only a half dozen of these have been translated into English in their entirety.

She is chiefly known to English-speaking readers through two closely related texts - "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1975) and The Newly Born Woman (1975) - that often appear on reading lists in women's studies courses or in courses on women's writing.

In this highly accessible introduction to a most complicated writer, Lynn Penrod attempts to remove the barrier to Cixous's works for the English-speaking reader - a barrier that derives from basic problems of translation and from major theoretical shifts in literary studies over the past 20 years.

Penrod presents Cixous as a writer exemplifying an extraordinarily rich vein of women's writing in contemporary France - from her academic work centering on James Joyce, her copious essays on philosophy and theory, and her now-classic essays on ecriture feminine to her novels, stories, "fictions," and dramatic works.

With its delight in wordplay and punning, the playfulness of its language, and its characteristic poetic style, Cixous's work, Penrod contends, provides an opportunity for exploring language in its purest form.
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation
People: Hélène Cixous (1937-)
LC classification: PQ2663.I9 Z8 1996