The Book of Em: A novel (Original writing, Helene Cixous, France)

The Project Demonstrating Excellence seeks to fulfill two goals: (1) to provide a context for American feminist literary critics who wish to understand the work of Helene Cixous in its complexities and (2) to demonstrate that it is possible for a creative writer who understands this context to write theory embedded in ecriture feminine in the way that Cixous does. My project is intended to provide the missing link between French and American feminist literary scholarship to open the way for the practice of ecriture feminine in the academic literary discourse community. The first part of my Project Demonstrating Excellence is a comprehensive analysis of Helene Cixous's contextual categories in a way that can be understood by scholars willing to investigate Cixous in depth. These include such wide-ranging topics as genre, literary and philosophical influences, biographical context, themes, phases, exile, dream states and the unconscious, the writing act and the limits of language, the nature of feminine discourse, psycholinguistics, translation, and textual analyses. Each category leads to further study.; The second part of my Project Demonstrating Excellence is a short novel written in ecriture feminine that demonstrates how enduring psychoanalytical and philosophical questions such as subjectivity, freedom, and the gift may be pursued in poetic fiction modeled after Cixous's feminine economy of creative writing. By using an unstable subject whose multiple character fragments reveal psychoanalytical theory and psycholinguistic conflicts, the text defies conventional literary forms and structures and challenges the reader to participate in the writing process.; This work challenges future research in women's studies, creative writing, literature, and feminist philosophy for those scholars interested in developing a viable inter-disciplinary writing practice.