Audience: Academic; Length: 1000 words.
In her 1975 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Hélène Cixous presents a treatise that manifests "écriture féminine" and the theoretical views of the French feminist school of literary thought, according to Bizzell and Herzberg (1521). In this manner, the essay presents itself as an elevated, academic text; however, the essay differs in style from conventional academic works--it includes an informal style of prose. Cixous writes without the more usual scholarly restraint, her words seeming to spill onto the page in a stream-of-consciousness manner.freelance jobs, freelance writer, writer, copywriter, seo, seo optimization, seo copywriter
In her essay, Cixous calls for and demonstrates what she hopes is a new way of writing for women. The tone is one of passion and excitement, and there is a strong sense of exhortation: Cixous is urging to women to write, not using the constraints of man's language, but in a liquid expression of feminine identity. She is appealing to others to follow her, to join her in a literary campaign away from man's language and toward woman's. Bizzell and Hertzberg state that Cixous "hopes to bring about, by celebrating in this essay, a rejection of male-dominated systems of interpretation that classify female bodies, mouths, and words as inferior" (1522). In this way, the text may seem to have more in common with a feminist movement pamphlet than with an academic study:freelance jobs, freelance writer, writer, copywriter, seo, seo optimization, seo copywriter
"And why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven’t written. (And why I didn’t write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it’s reserved for the great – that is for ‘great men’; and it’s ‘silly’." (Cixous 1525)
Cixous's unconventional style is further illustrated in her method of appealing to the audience. She wants not only to address her readers as a collective being, that is, woman, but also to appeal to each reader as an individual. To achieve this, she adopts a personal--intimate--manner, using both language and techniques. Many of her appeals are in the form of questions. Hans Guth recommends using questions in writing when making appeals or calling for action from the reader (697). Conversely, in writing academic text, one would not normally use this method, but the technique used would display detachment and formality--without personal appeals. (End of excerpt)
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