ABSTRACT
Hélène Cixous (1937-) is professor of literature at the University of Paris VIII, an experimental university that she helped to found in 1968, and where she established a doctoral program in women’s studies, the first and only one in France. Her childhood, as she describes it, was simultaneously Mediterranean and Nordic. Raised in Oran, Algeria, her father’s Jewish family had fled Spain for Morocco and spoke French, Spanish, and Arabic. Her Jewish mother and grandmother were German, and German was spoken in her home. She also learned Arabic and Hebrew from her father, who died in 1948. She learned English as a student in London in 1950, and moved to France in 1955 and became a student at Lycée Lakanal, a preparatory school for boys.
