Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art / Edition 1

by Julia Kristeva, Leon Roudiez, Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine

Overview

Desire in Language traces the path of an investigation, extending over a period of ten years, into the semiotics of literature and the arts. But the essays of Julia Kristeva in this volume, though they often deal with literature and art, do not amount to either "literary criticism" or "art criticism." Their concern, writes Kristeva, "remains intratheoretical: they are based on art and literature in order to subvert the very theoretical, philosophical, or semiological apparatus."

Probing beyond the discoveries of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Roman Jakobson and others, Julia Kristeva proposes and tests theories centered on the nature and development of the novel, and on what she has defined as a signifying practice in poetic language and pictural works. Desire in Language fully shows what Roman Jakobson has called Kristeva's "genuine gift of questioning generally adopted 'axioms,' and her contrary gift of releasing various 'damned questions' from their traditional question marks."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231048071
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	04/22/1982
Series:	European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	305
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Julia Kristeva, internationally known psychoanalyst and critic, is Professor of Linguistics at the University de Paris VII. She has hosted a French television series and is the author of many critically acclaimed books published by Columbia University Press in translation, including Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature and the novel, Possessions.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction by Leon S. Roudiez
1. The Ethics of Linguistics
2. The Bounded Text
3. Word, Dialogue, and Novel
4. How Does One Speak to Literature?
5. From One Identity to an Other
6. The Father, Love, and Banishment
7. The Novel as Polylogue
8. Giotto's Joy
9. Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini
10. Place Names
Index

What People are Saying About This

Roland Barthes

Kristeva changes the place of things: she always destroys the latest preconception, the one we thought we could be comforted by, the one of which we could be proud; what she displaces is the illusion that it has all been said already, that is, she removes the pressure of the signified----in a word, stupidity; what she subverts is authority----that of monological science, of filiation.

Roman Jakobson

Both readers and listeners, whether agreeing or in stubborn disagreement with Julia Kristeva, feel indeed attracted to her contagious voice and to her genuine gift of questioning generally adopted 'axioms,' or to her contrary gift of releasing various 'damned questions' from their traditional question mark.

Editorial Reviews

Kristeva changes the place of things: she always destroys the latest preconception, the one we thought we could be comforted by, the one of which we could be proud; what she displaces is the illusion that it has all been said already, that is, she removes the pressure of the signified­­in a word, stupidity; what she subverts is authority­­that of monological science, of filiation.

Roland Barthes

Kristeva's depiction of contrariety and anomaly at the heart of postmodernist theory is ingenious, provocative, and challenging.

Contemporary Literature

A provocative rereading of a diverse and crucial canon.

Criticism

An important work for students of cultural processes and anyone interested in a semiotic approach to the problems of cultural history.

Journal of Modern History - Hayden White

A provocative rereading of a diverse and crucial canon.-- "Criticism"

An important work for students of cultural processes and anyone interested in a semiotic approach to the problems of cultural history.--Hayden White "Journal of Modern History"

Kristeva's depiction of contrariety and anomaly at the heart of postmodernist theory is ingenious, provocative, and challenging.-- "Contemporary Literature"

From the Publisher