SOURCE: "From Narcissism to Seduction," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4635, January 31, 1992, p. 24.

Steiner is a Canadian-born American critic and educator who has written works on such authors as Gertrude Stein and Roman Jakobson. In the review below, she offers mixed assessments of "Coming to Writing," and Other Essays and Readings. Steiner concludes that "Cixous embodies a paradox…. [She represents a radical contemporaneity … but aesthetically she belongs in the early twentieth century."]

Ten years ago, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray were names to conjure with. Today, at least in France, "Feminism, like Marxism, structuralism, poststructuralism (or like the narrow striped tie?), is definitively passé." "No one", Susan Rubin Suleiman goes on, "that is, no one … dans le vent … 'does' it anymore." Having just returned from Moscow where no one does it at all, and seemingly never did, and from London, where they do it...