SOURCE: "Coming to Reading Hélène Cixous," in "Coming to Writing," and Other Essays, Harvard University Press, 1991, pp. 183-96.

Jenson edited "Coming to Writing," and Other Essays and contributed to it the essay excerpted below. In the following, she provides a thematic and stylistic overview of Cixous's works collected in the volume.

In Hélène Cixous's 1976 essay "Coming to Writing," a remarkable "capitalist-realist superuncle," an "Anti-other in papaperson," rehashes the sober facts of the narrator's failure to allow herself to be captured within a recognizable literary tradition: "We think you're here," he says, "and you're there. One day we tell ourselves: this time we've got her, it's her for sure. This woman is in the bag. And we haven't finished pulling the purse strings when we see you come in through another door." Today, in the 1990s, Cixous's writing has become a part of recognizable literary...