The Exile of James Joyce

by Hélène Cixous

English, French (translation)

Genres: Literature

765 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Hélène Cixous is a Jewish-French, Algerian-born feminist well-known as one of the founders of poststructuralist feminist theory along with Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. She is now a professor of English Literature at University of Paris VIII and chairs the Centre de Recherches en Etudes Féminines which she founded in 1974.

She has published numerous essays, playwrights, novels, poems, and literary criticism. Her academic works concern subjects of feminism, the human body, history, death, and theatre.

Reviews

[Alex Lee]

This impressive text digs into James Joyce as a free-for-all you can get about James Joyce. Cixous constructs vast sheets of consistency from multiple angles in order to highlight the thing-in-itself, as explored by Joyce. She exceeds the New Criticism approach and introjects cultural and biographical information in order to draw parallels between text and life. Cixous teases from this vast web of information various trends that repeat themselves, weaving together through Joyce as forces he then embodies within text as a sum greater than its parts. Ultimately Joyce births more than a world, he creates a world about a world; a text without reference whose birth and death coincide; a zenith of writing in the form of Finnegans Wake. Although I do not particularly like Joyce, as a person or a writer, I can admire the text that Cixous has made her; demonstrating her love of these texts and her determination to show us them inside out.

[Sean A.]

A densely woven critical examination of Joyce's life through his work, his work through his life. Cixous herself is an admirable prose stylist, along with being an astute critic. Had someone else taken this on, another critic via another author, I'd say "No! Don't read so much of that person's life into their work!" But Cixous and Joyce make it happen.