Hélène Cixous, Le Jour où je n'étais pas là [The Day I Wasn't There]

Susan Sellers (University of St Andrews)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.5.2.07: French Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Kate Averis (University of Western Australia), Hugo Azerad (University of Cambridge), Patrick ffrench (King's College London), Edward Forman (University of Bristol), Akane Kawakami (Birkbeck, University of London), Siobhán McIlvanney (King's College London), Sinan Richards (King's College London), Tim Unwin (University of Bristol), David Williams (University of Sheffield)

Dates

First circulation or publication 2000

Places

Algeria (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel
- Nouveau Roman

Resources

Save to Bookshelf

Hélène Cixous's

Le jour où je n'étais pas là

[

The Day I Was Not There

] is one of a number of her recent fictions that returns the author to her Algerian background. In common with

Les rêveries de la femme sauvage: Scènes primitives

[

Dreamings of the Wild Woman: Primitive Scenes

], which was published in the same year, one of the starting points for

Le jour où je n'étais pas là

was the wealth of material Cixous uncovered as she began to question her mother, Eve Cixous, about the maternity clinic she ran in Algiers following the tragic death from tuberculosis at the age of 39 of Hélène Cixous's father, Georges Cixous, in 1948. As the enterprise of a German Jew married to a French Jew disbarred from practising medicine by the Vichy regime, Eve Cixous's clinic presents a unique…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

1251 words

Citation: Sellers, Susan. "Le Jour où je n'étais pas là". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 October 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=9441, accessed 25 April 2024.]

Save this article