FRANCE AUTHOR · GENERAL · BIOGRAPHY
Hélène Cixous
Hélène Cixous ( sihk-SOO; French: [siksu]; born 5 June 1937) is a French writer, playwright and literary critic. During her academic career, she was primarily associated with the Centre universitaire de Vincennes (today's University of Paris VIII), which she co-founded in 1969 and where she created the first centre of women's studies at a European university. Known for her experimental writing style and great versatility as a writer and thinker, she has written more than seventy books dealing with multiple genres: theatre, literary and feminist theory, art criticism, autobiography and poetic fiction. She first gained attention in 1969 with her first work of fiction, Dedans (Inside), a semi-autobiographical novel which won the Prix Médicis and explored the themes of identity, memory, death and writing. She is perhaps best known for her 1976 article "The Laugh of the Medusa", which established her as one of the early thinkers in post-structural feminism.
The weed of crime, according to the Shadow, bears bitter fruit.
— from Readings
Most acclaimed
The Book of Promethea (Le livre de Promethea)
In writing Le Livre de Promethea Hélène Cixous set for herself the task of bridging the immeasurable distance between love and language. She describes a love between two women in its totality, experienced as both a physical presence and a sense of infinity. The result is a stunning example of Pecriture feminine that won kudos when published in France in 1983. Its translation into English by Betsy Wing will extend the influence of a writer already famous for her novels and contributions to feminist theory.
Inside
Inside is an intimate narrative of the mind and heart of a young girl as she recounts the passionate love she feels for her father. The borders imposed by the skin and flesh of their two separate bodies disappear - her fusion with her father is total. When he dies, the frightened girl must confront her own identity apart from her paternal love, or risk her own death. Drawing on images from her memory and dreams, she slowly comes to realize that the elusive psychic reality that has sustained her heretofore must be sacrificed if she completes the rite of passage form childhood to womanhood.
Rêveries de la femme sauvage
"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