Monique Wittig is one of relatively few French feminist writers whose work has made an impact on both sides of the Atlantic, even though her audience has been largely restricted to radical feminist groups and progressive academic circles. Within these...

"A Memorial Tribute to Monique Wittig" was presented at Antioch University in Los Angeles in March 2003. We are gathered here tonight to honor the memory of Monique Wittig, a luminary in the worlds of feminism, lesbianism and literature, whose death on Jan....

Monique Wittig burst onto the French literary scene in 1964 with the publication of her first novel, L'opoponax, at the age of 29, for which she was awarded the Prix Medicis, one of the most prestigious literary awards in France. With her subsequent...

The Opoponax, I suspect, is the result of an accidental discovery in the laboratory of the novel. The young Monique Wittig … may have been experimenting with the problem of the narrator in a fictional work: what we call or used to call the point-of-view. The Jamesian problem. Most western novelists today accept as a matter of course the Jamesian solution. James's formula ('Dramatise, dramatise!') has meant the end of auctorial description, including the analysis of motives and be...

No male figure is more traditional—literarily, psychologically, historically—than the epic hero. Thus it is all the more surprising and stimulating to see the heroic mode used in Les Guérillères to express the feminist point of view, and to see, moreover, that the work succeeds brilliantly on several levels…. Ignoring or flouting literary fashion, the book combines atemporal anachronism with anthropological description and epic pastiche with dead seriousness of tone. Add s...

[It may] be that the refusal of Wittig's Les Guérillères to act like much of a novel at all will be taken as a sign of its newness and originality. The book is about a time when women live as guerrillas, by themselves, fighting men, seeking a new age; its techniques are mostly impersonal and their aim is to achieve something like epic distance and grandeur. But though the idea of such a book may well raise high hopes in at least some readers, the book itself turns out to be, sadly, oddl...