Language and Politics in Julia Kristeva

Literature, Art, Therapy

By Carol Mastrangelo Bové

Subjects: Feminist
Series: SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture
Paperback : 9780791466506, 172 pages, January 2006
Hardcover : 9780791466490, 172 pages, January 2006

Table of contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Eruption of Conflict: Revolution in Poetic Language
2. A Politics of Desire: Reading Proust with Kristeva
3. Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Remembrance
4. Revisiting Modernism: DeBeauvoir, Truffaut, and Renoir
5. The Two Faces of the Mother’s Mask: Céline and China
6. Kristeva’s Work in the Eighties: A New Space for Woman and Love
7. Fiction, Fact, and Theory: The World as Flesh and Blood
Conclusion
Notes
Index

Explores the political implications of Kristeva’s theoretical and fictional writings.

Description

In Language and Politics in Julia Kristeva, Carol Mastrangelo Bové explores how Kristeva's theoretical and fictional writings contribute to an understanding of contemporary personal and international conflicts. In addition to examining Kristeva's turn to Eastern models—both Russian and Chinese—in thinking through a critique of symbolic language in Western patriarchal psychic formations, Bové also contributes to the debate over essentialism through innovative interpretations of such major works of twentieth-century French culture as Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Simone de Beauvoir's She Came to Stay, François Truffaut's Jules and Jim, and Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game. Bové argues that the links between the body and the female, on the one hand, and authority and the male, on the other, are psychologically constructed, and are not necessarily or exclusively biological. The book concludes with an examination of Kristeva's Colette.

Carol Mastrangelo Bové is Professor of French at Westminster College in Pennsylvania.