Engaged debate among feminist, political, and psychoanalytic thinkers has secured Julia Kristeva's status as one of the most formidable figures in twentieth-century critical theory. Nevertheless, her precise relevance to the study of literature - the extent to which her theory is specifically a literary theory - can be hard for new readers to fathom. This approachable volume explores Kristeva's definition of literature, her methods for analyzing it, and the theoretical ground on which those endeavors are based. Megan Becker-Leckrone argues that Kristeva's signature concepts, such as abjection and intertextuality, lose much of their force when readers extract them from the specific, complex theoretical context in which Kristeva produces them. Early chapters situate her theory in a broader conversation with Roland Barthes, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and others around the issues of reading, textuality, and subjectivity. Subsequent chapters look at Kristeva's actual engagements with literary texts, specifically her challenging, highly performative reading of French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection and her career-long preoccupation with James Joyce. A final chapter of the book looks at the way contemporary literary critics have marshaled her ideas in re-reading the poetry of William Wordsworth, while a helpful glossary identifies Kristeva's most pertinently "literary" theoretical concepts, by way of synopses of the texts in which she presents them.

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva offers an extensive and profound consideration of the nature of abjection. Drawing on Freud and Lacan, she analyzes the nature of attitudes toward repulsive subjects and examines the function of these topics in the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and other authors. Kristeva identifies the abject with the eruption of the real and the presence of death. She explores how art and religion each offer ways of purifying the abject, arguing that amid abjection, boundaries between subject and object break down.

Desire in Language traces the path of an investigation into the semiotics of literature and the arts. Julia Kristeva proposes and tests theories centered on the nature and development of the novel.

A clear introduction to Kristeva examining her work on language and textuality, subjectivity, feminism and sexuality, politics, identity and nationality.

An easily accessible introduction to Kristeva's work in English. The essays have been selected as representative of the three main areas of Kristeva's writing--semiotics, psychoanalysis, and political theory--and are each prefaced by a clear, instructive introduction. For beginners or those familiar with Kristeva's work this is a good complement to The Portable Kristeva with a convenient selection of articles from Kristeva's earlier work some of which are otherwise hard to come by.

Julia Kristeva's blend of the literary with the psychoanalytic places her work central to current thinking, from semiotics and critical theory to feminism and psychoanalysis. Her profound understanding of the dynamics of intention and creativity mark her out as one of the leading theoreticians of desire. Each essay in this volume offers new insight into the many aspects that make up Kristeva's thought, ranging from her analyses of sexual difference, female temporality and the perceptions of the body to the mental states of abjection and melancholia, and their representation in painting and literature.

In Revolution in Poetic Language, Julia Kristeva explicates her foundational distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic and explores their interrelationships. Linking the psychosomatic to the literary and the literary to a larger political horizon, she questions the premises of linguistic, psychoanalytic, philosophical, and literary theories.

As a linguist, Julia Kristeva has pioneered a revolutionary theory of the sign in its relation to social and political emancipation; as a practicing psychoanalyst, she has produced work on the nature of the human subject and sexuality, and on the "new maladies" of today's neurotic. The Portable Kristeva is the only fully comprehensive compilation of Kristeva's key writings. The second edition includes added material from Kristeva's most important works of the past five years, including The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, Intimate Revolt, and Hannah Arendt. Editor Kelly Oliver has also added new material to the introduction, summarizing Kristeva's latest intellectual endeavors and updating the bibliography.

Julia Kristeva is a true polymath, an intellectual of astonishingly wide range whose erudition and insight have been brought to bear on psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender and sex, and cultural critique. Passions of Our Time showcases recent essays of Kristeva’s that demonstrate the scope of her capacious intellect, her gifts as a stylist, and the profound contribution of her thought to the challenges of the present. The collection begins with а vivid recollection of celebrating, as a child in Bulgaria, Alphabet Day, the holiday honoring the Cyrillic letters, which proceeds outward into a contemplation of the writer as translator. Kristeva considers literature with Barthes, freedom through Rousseau, Teresa of Avila and mystical experience, Simone de Beauvoir’s dream life, and Antigone and the psychic life of women. A group of essays drawing on her psychoanalytic work delve into Freud, Lacan, maternal eroticism, and the continued importance of psychoanalysis today. In a series of striking investigations, she thinks through disability and normativity, monotheism and secularization, the need to believe and the desire to know. Calling for the courage to renew and reinvent humanism, she outlines the principles of a stance founded on the importance of respecting human life. Finally, Kristeva discusses French culture and diversity, rethinking universalism and interrogating the potential for Islam and psychoanalysis to meet, and pays homage to Beauvoir by rephrasing her dictum into the provocative “One is born woman, but I become one.”

Not only a meditation on Proust, this is a commentary on how the experience of literature is manifested in time and sensation. Kristeva uses Proust as a starting point to reflect upon broader notions of character, time, sensation, metaphor, and history.