Helene Cixous, author of over forty works of fiction, was deemed by Derrida to be the greatest living writer in French in 1990. Consistent with this evaluation, her writing is renowned for its dense poetical texture and lyricism. At the same time, she has been described by one of Derrida'stranslator's, 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 thecreation 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 theborders 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. | Cixous’s Semi-Fictions by Mairéad Hanrahan, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters