Over the past two decades, French literature has explored new ways of expressing the self and the relationship between the self and the world. With the advent of the human sciences--linguistics, anthropology, and psychoanalysis--literary texts have undergone radical transformation. The very boundaries between literature and other disciplines have been called into question. Writers and readers alike claim that the written text is not just an expression of a self or an imitation of a preexisting reality. Rather, they put emphasis on language itself and assert that the writing self structures himself, herself, in the text through the choice of rhetorical figures, insistences, and omissions--in a word, through styles. From the inception of her ouvre some twenty years ago to the present, Hélène Cixous writes at the crossroads of the human sciences and literature.

Passionately interested in limits, boundaries, and frontiers, she has continually read...