Stigmata: Escaping Texts

Hèléne Cixous — author, playwright and French feminist theorist — is a key figure in twentieth-century literary theory. Stigmata brings together her most recent essays for the first time.
Acclaimed for her intricate and challenging writing style, Cixous presents a collection of texts that get away — escaping the reader, the writers, the book. Cixous's writing pursues authors such as Stendhal, Joyce, Derrida, and Rembrandt, da Vinci, Picasso — works that share an elusive movement in spite of striking differences. Along the way these essays explore a broad range of poetico-philosophical questions that have become characteristic of Cixous' work:
•love's labours lost and found
•feminine hours
•autobiographies of writing
•the prehistory of the work of art
Stigmata goes beyond theory, becoming an extraordinary writer's testimony to our lives and times.

Library Journal

Cixous, author of more than 30 books of fiction, essays, and plays and professor of literature at the University of Paris 8, which she helped found in 1968, describes this work as an autobiographical narrative. One of the scant autobiographical facts she mentions is that her father, a Jewish physician, chose to raise his family in an Arab neighborhood in Algeria rather than a French one. As long as her father lived, the family was treated with respect, but when he died, she claims that the Arabs spurned the family because of their " `jewfrenchness,' a double original sin." Cixous's essays reveal her vast erudition, covering topics as diverse as sexual difference, postcolonial theory, literary theory, love, life, and death. In one essay, her analysis of the works of James Joyce and Clarice Lispector are especially insightful. This is fascinating reading, especially for comparative literature and other scholars.--Robert T. Ivey, Univ. of Memphis