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Author Picks

Thieves of Language

Photo of Domnica Radulescu

Domnica Radulescu

dominica-radelscu

The French writer and feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous urged women to be thieves of language as well as to fly with language. The French language very conveniently offers such a beautiful semantic overlap as the word voler means both to steal and to fly. Cixous also coined the term écriture feminine (feminine writing) to refer to a new kind of women’s writing that emerges from a place of embodiment and at the intersection between female sexuality and creativity. Since women have been relegated for so long to the margins of language and history, Cixous urges us to create new languages and histories that speak of and testify to our particular experience in the world and thus transform our marginal status into one of equality with the male created languages and histories. Such innovative discourse has been brilliantly illustrated by many women writers of this and the past century. The five books I have chosen, all written by women writers, have one thing in common: they all innovate at the level of voice, style and narrative structures and illustrate each in their own very particular voice, a radical departure from the traditional novel, its linear chronologies, and traditional realism while creating empowered female characters and being both thieves of language and flying with it.

About the Author

Domnica Radulescu

Domnica Radulescu is a distinguished professor of French and Italian literature at Washington and Lee University, a Fulbright scholar, and an award-winning playwright. She escaped the Communist dictatorship in her native Romania in 1983 and settled in the United States as a political refugee. Radulescu is also the author of Train to Trieste, which won the Library of Virginia Fiction Award. Her latest book is Country of Red Azaleas.