Published in 1991 (first published 1984)
222 pages
Verena Andermatt Conley teaches Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She is the author of Ecopolitics: The Environment in French Poststructuralist Thought (Routledge, 1996), Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine (University of Nebraska Press, 1991), and a memoir, The War against the Beavers (2003).
What is this book about?
Born in Algeria in 1937, Hélène Cixous achieved world fame for her short stories, criticism, and fictionalized autobiography (Dedans, 1969). Her work quickly became controversial because it frankly tested a distinction between male and female writing. Her literary experiments and her conclusions make her one of the most stimulating and most elusive feminist theorists of our time.
Verena Andermatt Conley has written the first full-length study of Cixous in English. Looking at Cixous as writer, teacher, and theoretician, Conley takes up Cixous’s ongoing exploration of the “feminine” as related to the “masculine”—words not to be equated with “woman” and “man”—and her search for a terminology less freighted with emotion and prejudgment. Conley has updated this edition with a new preface, bibliography, and interview with Cixous conducted by the editors of Hors Cadre.
