Explores the links between the fictional and the theoretical in Hélène Cixous's writing Hélène Cixous, one of France's most prolific authors, was deemed by Jacques Derrida in 1990 to be the greatest living writer in French. She has also been described, by Peggy Kamuf, as 'one of our age's greatest semi-theoreticians'. Connecting these two views, this book argues for a consideration of her texts as 'semi-fictions'. Telling stories is, irreducibly, part of what Cixous does; it is irreducibly part of what she does. Fiction is at once the creation of an imaginary world and an ethical engagement, as intellectual as it is passionate, with the difficulties of the real. This book offers an in-depth reading of five different texts, addressing the idiomatic specificity of individual works and investigating how the textual fabric unfolds. It shows that the narrative dimension to Cixous's writing needs to be reckoned with as a key component of the way it troubles the borders between fiction and its others. Each work is approached in relation to a particular theoretical question or discourse to explore how, in staging an encounter with something beyond itself, her fiction is the site of an active thinking. Mairéad Hanrahan is Professor of French at University College London.

Mairéad Hanrahan is Professor of French at University College London. She is Editor of the journal Paragraph.