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.
Black and white photograph of Hélène Cixous by Claude Truong-Ngoc, September 2011. She is wearing a light jacket over a high necked black sweater, with a piece of black clothing swung over her shoulder. She has short, cropped grey hair and a slight, enigmatic smile.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Anthologization Julia Kristeva
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 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...
Intertextuality and Influence Alison Fell
Four epigraphs include one each from Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous .
Fell, Alison, editor. Serious Hysterics. Serpent’s Tail, 1992.
2
AF 's introduction begins with the ancient Egyptians, who, she says, first attributed women's vagaries to a womb wandering out of its...
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 Ali Smith
Ultimately, AS produced a work she describes as a nasty warring book, a book of two sides.
qtd. in
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 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 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.
22

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Cixous, Hélène. "Coming to Writing" and Other Essays. Editor Jenson, Deborah, Translators Cornell, Sarah et al., Harvard University Press, 1991.
Cixous, Hélène. Angst. Des Femmes, 1977.
Cixous, Hélène. Angst. Translator Levy, Jo, John Calder and Riverrun Press, 1985.
Cixous, Hélène. Dedans. B. Grasset, 1969.
Cixous, Hélène. “Difficult Joys”. The Body and the Text, edited by Helen Wilcox et al., St. Martin’s Press, 1990.
Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clément. “Exchange”. The Newly Born Woman, translated by. Betsy Wing and Betsy Wing, University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Cixous, Hélène. “From the Scene of the Unconscious to the Scene of History”. The Future of Literary Theory, edited by Ralph Cohen and Ralph Cohen, Routledge, 1989.
Cixous, Hélène. Hyperdream. Polity, 2009.
Cixous, Hélène. Inside. Translator Barko, Carol, Schocken Books, 1986.
Gilbert, Sandra M. et al. “Introduction: A Tarantella of Theory”. The Newly Born Woman, translated by. Betsy Wing and Betsy Wing, University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clément. La Jeune née. Union générale des éditions, 1975.
Cixous, Hélène. “La Rire de la Méduse”. L’Arc, No. 61, 1975, pp. 39-54.
Cixous, Hélène. Manne: aux Mandelstams aux Mandelas. Des Femmes, 1988.
Cixous, Hélène. Osnabrück. Des Femmes, 1999.
Cixous, Hélène. Politics, Ethics and Performance Hélène Cixous and the Théâtre du Soleil. Editor Stevens, Lara, re.press, 2016.
Cixous, Hélène. Portrait de Jacques Derrida en jeune saint Juif. Galilée, 2001.
Cixous, Hélène. “Preface”. The Hélène Cixous Reader, edited by Susan Sellers, Routledge, 1994.
Cixous, Hélène. “Reaching the Point of Wheat, or a Portrait of the Artist as a Maturing Woman”. New Literary History, Vol.
19
, No. 1, pp. 1-21.
Cixous, Hélène et al. “Sorties”. The Newly Born Woman, translated by. Betsy Wing and Betsy Wing, University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Cixous, Hélène. The Exile of James Joyce. Translator Purcell, Sally, D. Lewis, 1972.
Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa”. Signs, translated by. Keith Cohen et al., Vol.
1
, No. 4, pp. 875-93.