Reginald Gibbons: How to use Hélène Cixous (July 2005)

Our habitual thinking and feeling, Reginald Gibbons suggests, lead us to follow familiar routes in our writing. How might we use Cixous’s ideas about writing to surprise ourselves and work against our own grain? Gibbons draws on a range of Hélène Cixous’ writing—and its connection to authors ranging from William Maxwell to Patrick White to Allen Ginsberg—to explore how playfulness, accessing the unconscious and writing to find the other hidden in ourselves, might deepen our writing, and our understanding of it.