Cixous, Hélène 1937–

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Cixous, Hélène 1937–

PERSONAL: Surname is pronounced "Seek-sue"; born June 5, 1937, in Oran, Algeria; daughter of Georges (a physician) and Eva (a midwife; maiden name, Klein) Cixous; married, 1955 (divorced, 1964); children: Anne Berger, Pierre-François Berger. Education: Received Agregation d'Anglais, 1959, and Docteur es Lettres, 1968.

ADDRESSES: Office—Université de Paris VIII, 2 rue de la Liberte, 93526 St. Denis Cedex 02, France; Éditions des Femmes, 6 rue de Mezieres, 75006 Paris, France.

CAREER: University of Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France, assistante, 1962–65; University of Paris (Sorbonne), Paris, France, maitre assistante, 1965–67; University of Paris X, Nanterre, France, maitre de conference, 1967–68; cofounder of experimental University of Paris VIII, Vincennes (then St. Denis), France, 1968, professor of English literature, beginning 1968, founder and director of Centre de Recherches en Etudes Feminines and doctoral program in women's studies, beginning 1974; co-founder of Revue de Theorie et d'Analyse Litteraire: Poetique, 1969. Visiting professor and lecturer at numerous universities, including Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, New York University, Northwestern University, State University of New York at Binghamton and Buffalo, Swarthmore University, University of Wisconsin—Madison, University of California at Berkeley, and universities in Austria, Canada, Denmark, England, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, Norway, Tunisia, and Spain.

AWARDS, HONORS: Prix Medicis, 1969, for Dedans; Southern Cross of Brazil, 1989; Legion d'Honneur, 1994; Prix des Critiques for best theatrical work, 1994, for La Ville parjure, ou le reveil des Erinyes; Doctor Honoris Causa, Queen's University, Canada, 1991, Edmonton University, Canada, 1992, York University, England, 1993, Georgetown University, 1995, and Northwestern University, 1996; Amb of Star Awards, Pakistan, 1997; Officier, Ordre Nationale du Merite, 1998.

WRITINGS:

FICTION

Le prenom de dieu (stories), Grasset et Fasquelle (Paris, France), 1967.

Dedans, Grasset et Fasquelle (Paris, France), 1969, 2nd edition, Femmes (Paris, France), 1986, translation by Carol Barko published as Inside, Schocken (New York, NY), 1986.

Le troisiéme corps, Grasset et Fasquelle (Paris, France), 1970, translation by Keith Cohen published as The Third Body, Northwestern University Press (Chicago, IL), 1999.

Les commencements, Grasset et Fasquelle (Paris, France), 1970.

Un vrai jardin (poetic short story), L'Herne (Paris, France), 1971.

Neutre, Grasset et Fasquelle (Paris, France), 1972, translated and with an introduction by Lorene M. Birden published as Neuter, Bucknell University Press (Lewisburg, PA), 2004.

Portrait du soleil, Denoöl (Paris, France), 1973. Tombe, Seuil (Paris, France), 1973.

Revolutions pour plus d'un Faust, Seuil (Paris, France), 1975.

Souffles, Femmes (Paris, France), 1975.

La, Gallimard (Paris, France), 1976, 2nd edition, Femmes (Paris, France), 1979.

Partie, Femmes (Paris, France), 1976.

Angst, Femmes (Paris, France), 1977, translation by Jo Levy published as Angst, Riverrun Press (New York, NY), 1985.

Preparatifs de noces au dela de l'abime, Femmes (Paris, France), 1978.

Ananke, Femmes (Paris, France), c. 1979.

Vivre l'orange/To Live the Orange (bilingual edition), English translation by Ann Liddle and Sarah Cornell, Femmes (Paris, France), 1979.

Illa, Femmes (Paris, France), 1980.

With; ou, l'art de l'innocence, Femmes (Paris, France), 1981.

Limonade tout etait si infini, Femmes (Paris, France), 1982.

Le livre de Promethea, Gallimard (Paris, France), 1983, translation by Betsy Wing published as The Book of Promethea, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1991.

La bataille d'Arcachon (tale), Trois (Laval, Quebec, Canada), 1986.

Manne aux Mandelstams aux Mandelas, Femmes (Paris, France), 1988, translation by Catherine A.F. MacGillivray published as Manna: For the Mandelstams for the Mandelas, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1993.

Jours de l'an, Femmes (Paris, France), 1990, translated by Catherine A.F. MacGillivray as First Days of the Year, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1997.

L'ange au secret, Femmes (Paris, France), 1991.

Deluge, Femmes (Paris, France), 1992.

Beethoven à jamais; ou, l'existence de dieu, Femmes (Paris, France), 1993.

The Hélène Cixous Reader, Routledge (New York, NY), 1994.

La fiancée juive; ou, de la tentation, Femmes (Paris, France), 1995.

Messie, Femmes (Paris, France), 1996.

Or: les lettres de mon père, Femmes (Paris, France), 1997.

Osnabruck, Femmes (Paris, France), 1999.

Le jour; ou, je n'etais pas la, Galilee (Paris, France), 2000, translation by Beverley Bie Brahic published as The Day I Wasn't There, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 2004.

Veils, translated by Geoffrey Bennington, with drawings by Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 2001.

Rêve je te dis (fiction collection), Galilée (Paris, France), 2003.

ESSAYS

L'exil de James Joyce; ou, l'art du remplacement (doctoral thesis), Grasset et Fasquelle (Paris, France), 1968, translation by Sally A.J. Purcell published as The Exile of James Joyce, D. Lewis (New York, NY), 1972.

Prenoms de personne, Seuil (Paris, France), 1974.

(With Catherine Clement) La jeune nee, Union Gen-erale, 1975, translation by Betsy Wing published as The Newly Born Woman, introduction by Sandra M. Gilbert, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1986.

Un K incomprehensible: Pierre Goldman, Bourgois, 1975.

(With Madeleine Gagnon and Annie Leclerc) La venue a l'ecriture, Union Generale, c. 1977.

Entre l'ecriture, Femmes (Paris, France), c. 1986.

L'heure de Clarice Lispector: precede de vivre l'orange (literary criticism), Femmes (Paris, France), 1989, translation by Verena Andermatt Conley published as Reading with Clarice Lispector, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1990.

"Coming to Writing," and Other Essays, translation by Sarah Cornell and others, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1991.

Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetaeva (literary criticism), translated, edited, and with an introduction by Ver-ena Andermatt Conley, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1992.

Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (lectures), translation by Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers, introduction by Jacques Derrida, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1993.

(With Mireille Calle-Gruber) Hélène Cixous: Photos de racines, Femmes (Paris, France), 1994, translation by Eric Prenowitz published as Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memories and Life Writing, Routledge (New York, NY), 1997.

Stigmata: Surviving Texts, Routledge (New York, NY), 1998.

Les rêveries de la femme sauvage: scènes primitives, Galilee (Paris, France), 1999.

Benjamin à Montaigne: il ne faut pas le dire, Galilee (Paris, France), 2001.

Manhattan: lettres de la préhistoire (autobiography), Galilee (Paris, France), 2002.

Portrait de Jacques Derrida en jeune saint juif, [France], translation by Beverley Bie Brahic published as Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Author of manifesto "Le rida de la Meduse" (title means "The Laugh of the Medusa"). Work represented in anthologies, including New French Feminisms, edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, MA), 1980, and The Future of Literary Theory, edited by Ralph Cohen, 1987. Contributor to numerous periodicals.

PLAYS

La Pupille, Gallimard (Paris, France), 1972.

Portrait de Dora (produced in Paris, France, 1976), Femmes (Paris, France), 1976, translation by Anita Barrow published as Portrait of Dora, in Benmussa Directs, Riverrun Press, 1979.

La Prise de l'ecole de Madhubai (produced in Paris, France, 1983), translation by Deborah Carpenter published as The Conquest of the School at Madhubai in Women and Performance 3, 1986.

L'Histoire terrible mais inachevee de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge (produced in Paris, France, at Theatre du Soleil, 1985), translation by Juliet Flower MacCannell and others published as The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1994.

Theatre (collection), Femmes (Paris, France), 1986.

L'Indiade; ou, L'inde de leurs reves, produced in Paris, France, at Theatre du Soleil, 1987.

On ne part pas, on ne revient pas, introduction by Jacques Derrida, Femmes (Paris, France), 1991.

(Translator and author of introduction) Les Eumenides d'Eschyle, produced in Paris, France, 1992.

La Ville parjure; ou, Le reveil des Erinyes, produced in Paris, France, 1994.

Voile noir voile blanche/Black Sail White Sail (bilingual; English translation by Catherine A.F. MacGillivray produced in London, England, 1994), New Literary History (Minnesota), 1994.

L'Histoire qu'on ne connaitra jamais (produced in Paris), Femmes (Paris, France), 1994.

Tambours sur la digue, produced in Paris, France, at Theatre du Soleil, 1999.

Rouen, la treintième nuit de mai '31, Galilee (Paris, France), 2001.

Selected Plays, Routledge (New York, NY), 2003.

Also author of teleplay with Ariane Mnouchkine, La Nuit miraculeuse, 1989; author of radio play Amour d'une delicatesse, 1982.

OTHER

Le nom d'Oedipe: chant du corps interdit (libretto), music by Andre Boucourechliev, Femmes (Paris, France), 1978, translation by Christiane Makward and Judith Miller published as The Name of Oedipus in Out of Bounds: Women's Theatre in French, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1991.

Contributor to books, including Russel Banks, Le voyage en Palestine de la délégation du Parlement International des Écrivains en Réponse à un Appel de Mah-moud Darwish: suivi de l'appel pour la paix en Palestine du 6 mars 2002, Climats (Castelnau-le-Lez, France), c. 2002.

SIDELIGHTS: Hélène Cixous, a professor at the University of Paris and the founder and director of France's only doctoral program in women's studies, won the 1969 Prix Medicis for her first novel, Dedans, translated as Inside. La jeune nee, which she wrote in 1976 with Catherine Clement and which was translated ten years later as The Newly Born Woman, was deemed a "ground-breaking feminist tract" by a New York Times Book Review critic. Cixous also received wide acclaim for her doctoral thesis, published in 1968 as L'exil de James Joyce; ou, L'art du remplacement and translated in 1972 as The Exile of James Joyce. Although she supports and writes women's literature, Cixous once noted that she eschews the label "feminist" because of the politically restrictive and unanalyzed overtones the term has gained in its French context. She related to Stella Hughes in the Times Higher Education Supplement: "'Feminist' has an extremely precise meaning: It is a reformist demand in terms of equality and not at all in terms of difference." Cixous prefers the concept and the practice of what she calls the "poetics of sexual difference," and is one of the best-known and most influential advocates of ecriture feminine, or feminine writing—a form she notes may include works by both male and female writers. "This writing is dedicated to exploding the binary oppositions on which Western thinking rests," explained Marianne Hirsch in the New York Times Book Review, "which relegate woman to the side of silence, of otherness."

Cixous, like other French feminist writers, emphasizes "the place of 'woman' in language and the question of a feminine relation to language that [has] relatively little currency within Anglophone feminist thought," explained translator Annette Kuhn in Signs. Some critics find Cixous's writings an attempt to negate the male/female distinction through puns and word manipulations. According to Cixous, her aim is to defuse the violence of fixed sexual hierarchy without negating the infinite richness of sexual difference, by engaging all the resources of language, subverting standard usages or pushing them further than their conventionally fixed forms allow. She plays with the apparent rigidity of the grammatical gender that marks the French language, which, unlike English, has "masculine" and "feminine" words. Her aim is not to replace one rigid linguistic system with another, in a reformist shuffle, but rather to use the possibilities of language to take readers beyond their own self-imposed boundaries.

The English translation of Cixous's award-winning first novel was published as Inside in 1986, seventeen years after the original French edition appeared. The highly metaphoric work is commonly regarded as an autobiography, although the author did not introduce the book as such. The main character, like Cixous, was born of a North African Jewish father and a German Jewish mother and was raised in Algeria. The novel depicts the daughter's intense love for her father and the grief she suffers when he dies young, as Cixous's father did. "It dwells on a sense of enclosure and entrapment," Hirsch described. "The nameless narrator … is inside a family romance where her father is God, the owner of all the words, and where her German-speaking mother offers no access to knowledge." After her father dies, the daughter imagines his death ceaselessly, trying to understand it. Finally, related Hirsch, "she gains the means to write from [her father's] overwhelming bodily closeness and from his empowering mental gifts in life."

Some feminists decried the importance of the father's role in Inside as defeating the purpose of feminism, and a Kirkus Reviews critic deemed the "densely compact philosophical narrative" simply "intellectual passion from the school of radical French narrative, by turns brilliant and boring." Hirsch, however, offered high praise for the "series of reflections on identity, death and writing." The reviewer noted that Inside was timely as well as poignant, calling it a "moving and disturbing experimental work written at the moment of emergence of feminist consciousness—both for the author herself and for a broader intellectual and political movement whose important representative she would become."

Cixous maintains her "special and elusive style" in Angst, according to Lorna Sage in the London Observer. The novel, first published in 1977, was translated into English in 1985. "The writing is dense, direct, often lurid with metaphor as it records a woman's reflections on her life and her attempt to create mental order out of the chaos she finds," wrote Sage. Nicole Irving, in the Times Literary Supplement, praised Cixous's innovative prose style as well as the "loving" translation by Jo Levy, despite calling much of the book "incomprehensible." The reviewer noted that Cixous's "text has a rhythmic pattern, moving from obscurity to relative clarity, from the bodily (erotic and otherwise) to the sometimes punning metaphysical, from violence to calm and occasional tenderness, and at the end, 'she' [the main character] reaches a wholeness." As Sage observed: "The writing is alive even at its oddest."

Like Hirsch and Schneider, Olga Prjevalinskaya Ferrer observed in her World Literature Today review of the 1976 novel Partie that "Cixous's works most certainly voice a protest against the very strict rules of French intellectual thought and its expression through speech and writing." Perhaps as a protest against even the traditional appearance of books, Ferrer speculated, Cixous presented the work as a wide book divided into two sections, each upside down in relation to the other, with pages meeting in the middle of the volume. Commenting on the difficulty of classifying Partie in terms of genre, Ferrer stated that, although Cixous's "writings are, most of the time, poetic, her originality and freedom have surpassed any poetic thought, any poetic trends." The author's freedom of expression, the reviewer asserted, provides Partie with "an enchanting depth."

In Osnabruck Cixous creates yet another unique work of fiction. She is well known for her experimentation with words, coining new phrases, and taking eccentric liberties with her writing, and this novel is no exception. But, as Pamela A. Genova noted in World Literature Today, "Osnabruck distinguishes itself from Cixous's earlier works [because it] delves deeply into the realm of the personal, into Cixous's private musings on her own family history." Set against the backdrop of the German community of Osnabruck, a town with a turbulent political history, the author frames her personal reflections on family within the greater context of human history. As Cixous related to Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian, "We live in realistic circumstances and desperately need poetic expression and passion. I always want to express my views ethically and politically."

Even though the feminist movement that brought Cixous to the fore lost momentum by the late twentieth century, she has continued to strengthen her reputation as a highly inventive writer. Her publications included literary criticism, dramas, essays, and books that many reviewers consider unclassifiable. Modern Language Review contributor Clare Hanson commented on Cix-ous's Reading with Clarice Lispector, an analysis of the late Latin-American author: "Cixous's approach to Lispector mirrors that capacity to mark difference without recourse to binary, hierarchical oppositions which distinguishes Lispector's texts." The reviewer also noted: "What emerges is a reading … which is both powerful and delicate, in which Cixous holds in balance her own theoretical sophistication and the different economies, drives, and trajectories of Lispector's texts." Cixous discussed her own writing, and more, in her 1991 publication L'ange au secret. Patricia M. Gathercole stated in World Literature Today that the book contains "observations about human life and [Cixous's] own struggles in writing a book" and added, "The volume is … written in a highly imaginative style … [and] offers a powerful account of her own feelings and thoughts, her reflections on her identity as a writer."

On ne part pas, on ne revient pas was also published in 1991. World Literature Today reviewer Bettina L. Knapp called the work "perhaps one of Helen Cixous's finest and most powerful works," noting that the book "deals with death, love, sorrow, escape, violence—and music. As is true of many of Cixous's writings, it may be read on many levels. The work is a drama written in free verse, cadenced and stressed in keeping with the magma of sought-for meanings." Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, also released by Cixous in 1991, contains the text of a lecture series she delivered at the University of California—Irvine. In his introduction to this work, Jacques Derrida commented: "Cixous is today, in my view, the greatest writer in what I will call my language, the French language if you like. And I am weighing my words as I say that. For a great writer must be a poet-thinker, very much a poet and a very thinking poet."

In 1993 Cixous reached a new level of creativity, according to Genova. Reviewing Beethoven à jamais; ou, L'existence de dieu for World Literature Today, Genova marveled at Cixous's skill in weaving together many styles of writing. Beethoven a jamais "combines elements from several styles of writing, weaving together such forms as free verse, interior monologue, spoken dialogue, and third-person narrative prose," noted Genova. "This experimentation seems appropriate in a book whose central personality is that of Beethoven, present in all his forms: the man, the musical genius, the lover. Instead of merely describing the life or work of Beethoven, Cixous constructs a textual framework that reflects his talent and stands as a hymn to Beethoven and his music."

With; ou, L'art de l'innocence is about woman's multiplicity. "Cixous's sinuous prose poem is a conversation between various aspects of her person," explained Rosette C. Lamont in World Literature Today. Although the author's various selves are disparate, Lamont observed, "the many voices of Cixous's novel-poem blend into a single interrogation about freedom, a multilingual existence in l'ecriture and the mystery of being woman." Moving from a women's-eye view of the world to a broader perspective, her 2001 work Benjamin à Montaigne: Il ne faut pas le dire focuses on the history of the German people during the Holocaust. The story of Cixous's mother, who translates the events around her through an outsider's French-language perspective, the book is also a vehicle for Cixous to reflect on broader issues. As Genova noted in World Literature Today, "The problem of shame and disgrace, of the possibly unattainable desire for redemption and salvation, colors the often poetic passages in which Cixous offers her thoughts on issues of national identity and the development of a new nation-state."

Attempting another autobiographical work in 1997, Cixous published Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. The book reflects on her childhood in Algeria where she grew up in a city with heavy French, Arabic, and Spanish influences. Her parents, Jewish, chose to live in a non-European neighborhood. Cixous remembers feeling a distinct lack of identity while growing up, and she mixes these memories with historical references to the French colonial rule in Algeria. Jeffries, in the Guardian, called this collection of reflections "a fascinating life story," but he also felt that Cixous's "fractured allusive writing" makes the narrative incoherent at times.

In 1998 Cixous published two texts that revisit and rearrange her earlier ideas about women's writing and the body. First Days of the Year, written in essay form, examines the connection between writing and the female character. Stigmata is a collection of essays about topics ranging from sexual issues, to postcolonial and literary theory, to life and love. Nicole Cooley, in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, remarked that "Cixous's subversion of genre distinction is endlessly fascinating."

The author's fiction and nonfiction works continue to be translated into English, including Le Jour; ou, Je n'etais pas la, translated as as The Day I Wasn't There, and Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint. In the The Day I Wasn't There, Cixous presents a memoir-novel in which the narrator tells about the premature death of her first-born child, who was a Down's syndrome baby. As she tells the story, the narrator explores the narrator's family history, including her mother, who was a Nazi Germany refugee, her dead father, and a brother who is a medical student. The story ultimately ties into the baby's death as the meaning of the title becomes agonizingly clear. Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint is Cixous's look at the roles that Jewishness and non-Jewishness play in the life and works of her lifelong friend and renowned philosopher. In the process of creating a comprehensive portrait of Derrida, Cixous discusses everything from family relationships to the influence of writers and philosophers such as Celan, Rousseau, and others.

"Cixous tells us that she always wished she were a painter, and that this accounts for the way she writes," mused Peter Baker in an American Book Review piece on Cixous's "Coming to Writing" and Other Essays. "Somehow she manages to paint with words in such a way as actually to bring about an insight into what this might mean. Like the mimosa, which overwhelms the senses but recedes, sensitive to the touch, Cixous overwhelms the written word with layers of thought and sense-description, while withdrawing any possible center or point. As she says: 'And the lesson is: one does not paint ideas. One does not paint a subject. And in the same way: no writing ideas. There is no subject. There are only mysteries.'"

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Calle-Gruber, Mireille, editor, On the Feminine, Humanities Press (Atlantic Highlands, NJ), 1996.

Cixous, Hélène, On ne part pas, on ne revient pas, introduction by Jacques Derrida, Femmes (Paris, France), 1991.

Conley, Verena Andermatt, Writing the Feminine, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1984, expanded edition, 1991.

Conley, Verena Andermatt, Hélène Cixous, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1992.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 83: French Novelists since 1960, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1989, pp. 52-61.

Kim, C.W. Maggie, and others, editors, Transfigurations: Theology and the French Feminists, Fortress Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1993.

Moi, Toril, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, Methuen (New York, NY), 1985.

Nordquist, Joan, French Feminist Theory: Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous: A Bibliography, Reference and Research Services (Santa Cruz, CA), 1990.

Penrod, Lynn, Hélène Cixous, Twayne (New York, NY), 1996.

Sellers, Susan, Hélène Cixous: Authorship, Autobiography, and Love, Blackwell (Cambridge, MA), 1996.

Shiach, Morag, Hélène Cixous: A Politics of Writing, Routledge (London, England), 1991.

Stambolian, George, and Elaine Marks, editors, Homosexuality and French Literature, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1979.

Wilcox, Helen, editor, The Body and the Text: Hélène Cixous, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1990.

PERIODICALS

American Book Review, June-July, 1992, pp. 16, 18-19.

College Literature, winter, 2003, Lynn Penrod, "Algeriance, Exile, and Hélène Cixous," p. 135.

Contemporary Literature, summer, 1983.

French Forum, fall, 2001, Cynthia Running-Johnson, "Cixous's Left and Right Hands of Writing in Tambours sur la digue and Osnabruck," p. 111; spring, 2003, Mairead Hanrahan, "Of Three-legged Writing," p. 99.

French Review, March, 1999, p. 719; May, 1999, p. 1142; March, 2002, Laurence Enjolras, review of Le Jour; ou, Je n'etais pas la, p. 823.

French Studies, April, 2001, Miread Hanrahan, review of Le Livre de Promethea, p. 195.

Guardian (London, England), October 29, 1997, Stuart Jeffries, "A Bit of the Other" (interview with Cixous), p. 4.

Hypatia, fall, 2002, Laura Camille Tuley, "On Cardiac Rhythms," p. 218.

Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 1986, review of Inside.

Library Journal, June 15, 1993, p. 19; June 1, 1994, p. 106; September 1, 1997, Marilyn Gaddis Rose, review of Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, p. 181; July, 1998, Ali Houissa, review of First Days of the Year, p. 89; January, 1999, Robert T. Ivey, review of Stigmata, p. 95; September 1, 1999, Amy Irvine, review of The Third Body, p. 231.

Modern Language Review, October, 1993, pp. 934-936; January, 1998, Mairead Hanrahan, review of Portrait de Dora, p. 48.

New York Times, June 8, 1994, p. C13.

New York Times Book Review, February 11, 1973; August 24, 1986; December 7, 1986.

Observer (London, England), January 12, 1986; April 3, 1994, p. 22.

Publishers Weekly, March 21, 1994, pp. 55-56; July 12, 1999, review of The Third Body, p. 88.

Quebec Studies, fall-winter, 2003, Edith Vandervoort, "When They Were Young: Adolescent Representations in Les fous de Bassan," p. 69.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 1998, Mary Lydon, review of Hélène Cixous, Rootprints, p. 234; summer, 1999, Nicole Cooley, review of First Days of the Year, p. 135; spring, 2000, Tara Reeser, review of The Third Body, p. 181.

Romanic Review, November, 1999, Mairead Hanrahan, "Hélène Cixous's Improper Name," p. 481.

Signs, autumn, 1981.

Theatre Journal, March, 1994, pp. 31-44.

Theatre Research International, autumn, 1998, Sandra Freeman, "Bisexuality in Cixous's 'Le nom d'Oedipe,'" p. 242.

Times Literary Supplement, April 24, 1969; February 12, 1971; March 21, 1986; January 31, 1992, p. 24; December 24, 1993, p. 18; August 13, 1999, Elizabeth Fallaize, review of Stigmata, p. 24.

Triquarterly, fall, 1997, pp. 259-279.

Women's Review, May, 1985.

World Literature Today, winter, 1977; spring, 1977; summer, 1977; spring, 1981; summer, 1982; winter, 1984; summer, 1992, p. 482; winter, 1993, pp. 148-149; winter, 1994, p. 76; autumn, 1999, Pamela A. Genova, review of Osnabruck, p. 694; spring, 2002, Pamela A. Genova, review of Benjamin à Montaigne, p. 121.