French Feminists and Anglo-Irish Modernist: Cixous, Kristeva, Beckett and Joyce
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https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.199711275Abstract
This essay discusses the importance ascribed to the work of Samuel Beckett and James Joyce by two major French feminists: the philosopher and psychoanaJyst Julia Kristeva and the creative writer and philosopher Helene Cixous. An introductory section gives a short account of the controversy in English feminist academia over the importance attributed to the founding fathers of modernism, which does not appear to have arisen in the French feminist tradition. In Joyce and Beckett, Cixous and Kristeva have acknowledged imaginative models that developed their understanding of the socio-political structures that operate through the family and through language, through deep processes of repression, lo construct individual subjects, male or femaJe. These writers helped shape their perception of the extent to which the Law of the Father is the organising structure of society and its language. And most of all, they have stimulated reflection on the possibility of a language in which to think and talk differently about such things, with the intention of changing them: a language that might subvert patriarchaJ discourse.
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