DuPlessis writings create space for other women writers by mapping the margins of the ideologically patriarchal literary

"tradition, and exploring how a "she" might find and write into/around/above (palimpsest) those spaces. In postmodern fashion, she complicates notions of enclosed identity and the language that is used to describe it by exploring the problems with using a language formed by and continually reforming hierarchical binaries. The two phrases perhaps best associated with DuPlessis are breaking the sentence and breaking the sequence. Breaking the sentence, she explains, is a way of rupturing language and tradition sufficiently to invite a female slant, emphasis, or approach (Writing 32). Just as breaking the sentence involves an active process on the writers part, so does breaking the sequence entail rigorous effort: Breaking the sequence, writes DuPlessis, is a rupture of habits in narrative order, that expected story told when love was the only interpreter of womens textual lives (Writing 34). In order to truly break the sentence, the woman writer must extricate herself from stylistic and structural convention, and foster her own entirely new voice. She must do so fearlessly, deliberately, and she must do so with the knowledge that making such a linguistic stand will have one of two effects: either she will be lauded as a champion of 85 women, exemplifying bold and courageous expressionism, or she will be shunned, ridiculed, made more of a pariah because of her decision to be herSelf. In order to break the sentence, the woman author needs to accept and internalize her status as Other, and allow that knowledge to inform her prose Cixous has long been a proponent of life-writing. She demands writing that resists categorization; Cixous calls for a deconstruction of the phallogocentric system and argues for new approaches to the relationship between womens bodies and language. Specifically, in order to escape the discourse of mastery, Cixous believes women must begin to 'write the body.' To write with/one's body is a way to overcome the hierarchical bonds that repress and imprison women, and to allow these women to discover their own voice/s. In Medusa, Cixous uses a combination of psychoanalysis and deconstruction to criticize the very nature of writing. According to Cixous, writing by men is filled with binary oppositions, but a woman's writing should be scribbling, jottings-down, interrupted by life's demands. She asserts that the conscious, deliberate development of this kind of writing will change the rules that currently govern language and ultimately the thinking processes and the structure of society (Medusa 316).

Cixous, fascinated with Lacans suggestion that a relationship exists between gender and language or gender and writing, offers a twofold purpose for Medusa: to break up and destroy, and to foresee and project. She wants to destroy (or perhaps just deconstruct) the phallogocentric system Lacan describes, and to offer her own strategies for a new kind of relation between female bodies and language (Medusa 309).