Julia Kristeva

Standard Name: Kristeva, Julia
Birth Name: Julia Kristeva
Pseudonym: Julia Joyaux
JK is one of the three French feminist theorists whose writings dominated the field of British and especially French and North American literary criticism and humanities scholarship during the 1980s and 1990s. Particularly influential have been her contributions to theories of the body and of the maternal, and to rendering current in academic discourse the terms intertextuality, semiotics, and abjection. Since the twentieth century most of her writing has taken the form of psychoanalytical studies of the human mind, always involving historical witness from literature and art. She has also written novels, some of them mysteries, and a series of biographies of women.
Colour photo of Julia Kristeva sitting at a round white table. Her hair is short and blonde. She wears a black leather jacket and belt over a black shirt with embroidery at the neckline. She is smiling.
Colour photograph of Julia Kristeva in Paris in 2008. She is shown from the shoulders up, leaning forward with an eager smile. Her hair is short and blonde; she wears a black jacket; the background is an orange wall or wall hanging with a tall white design of a growing stem.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Fictionalization Hélène Cixous
In a novel translated into English in 2017 as The Seventh Function of Language, Laurent Binet has fun with the fame of HC , Roland Barthes , Julia Kristeva and her husband Philippe Sollers
Intertextuality and Influence Rosalind Coward
This work surveys recent philosophical and scientific schools that attempt to articulate the intersection of determining social structures, especially language, and the individuals implicated in them. Working from a historical materialist framework, Language and Materialism...
Intertextuality and Influence Alison Fell
Four epigraphs include one each from Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous .
Fell, Alison, editor. Serious Hysterics. Serpent’s Tail, 1992.
2
AF 's introduction begins with the ancient Egyptians, who, she says, first attributed women's vagaries to a womb wandering out of its...
Intertextuality and Influence Deborah Levy
This book has four sections, each titled from a reason for writing, Political Purpose, Historical Impulse, Sheer Egoism, and Aesthetic Enthusiasm. The first and last describe a period of near-breakdown that...
Intertextuality and Influence Christine Brooke-Rose
This was her last novel published by Raleigh Trevelyan of Michael Joseph —who was, she believed, fired with a golden handshake for accepting it.
Brooke-Rose, Christine. Invisible Author: Last Essays. Ohio State University Press, 2002.
128
Her choice of title was over-ruled because her publisher mistakenly...
Literary responses Colette
She later became its president. In February 1953 she received the Grand Cross of the Légion d'Honneur (only the second woman to do so).
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
(19 February 1953): 8
Her books, however, were listed on the...
Literary responses Rosalind Coward
Four years after its publication, a reviewer for Contemporary Sociology called this book the best available introduction in the English language to the semiotic structuralism of Saussure , Lévi-Strauss , and Lacan ; the structural...
Literary responses Hannah Arendt
Sybille Bedford called this book relentlessly abstract, and slow, cluttered, static, curiously oppressive, like the life its protagonist lived, hedged round with feminine frustrations.
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Hannah Arendt. For Love of the World. Yale University Press, 2004.
87
Julia Kristeva , who pays close attention to it...
Literary responses Hannah Arendt
Kristeva called this essay highly explosive.
Kristeva, Julia. Hannah Arendt. Guberman, RossTranslator , Columbia University Press, 2001.
113
Reception Hannah Arendt
On Revolution was comparatively little noticed at the time, overshadowed by HA 's book on Eichmann. It was, however, much read and studied in the mid and later 1960s, a time of the peace movement...
Textual Production Luce Irigaray
The series, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok , had also published work by Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov .
Irigaray, Luce. Le Langage des déments. The Hague, 1973.
359

Timeline

June 1966
AnthropologistMary Douglas published her best-known work, Purity and Danger, a study of ritual behaviour and taboo.
January 2010
The Simone de Beauvoir prize for women's liberty was awarded jointly to two Chinese women, Guo Jianmei , a lawyer, and Ai Xiaoming , a film-maker and professor of comparative literature.
Kristeva, Julia. “Women’s rights falter in China”. Guardian Weekly, p. 24.
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