Portmanteau

Noting that the reception of Cixous's work in an Anglophone context has, to date, been principally and in some respects misleadingly filtered through issues of feminist theory, this essay proposes the notion of the uncanny as an alternative way of exploring the significance and effects of her writings. Royle focuses on the relatively early "Fiction and Its Phantoms" (on Freud's "The Uncanny") and her essay on Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass in order to elucidate their crucial relationship with the writings of Jacques Derrida. Royle expounds a detailed reading of the figure of the portmanteau as a way of apprehending the remarkable complexity and strangeness, as well as the beauty and humor of Cixous's work.