Julia and her crew had a huge influence on academic work of that era, and they even managed to seriously irritate many American academics, which can never be a bad thing-that's how you know you've really made it. She's a beautiful, intellectual psychoanalyst and academic who has produced copious amounts of writing on motherhood and childbirth (beautiful and cozy), the abject (ick), time (how literature mixes up the present and the past), melancholy (all about lost attachments), and beyond. Julia Kristeva has it all, so try not to get too jealous. She and a bunch of other members of the French intellectual royalty (e.g., Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault) were in an organization called the Tel Quel, which was dedicated to the study of avant-garde literature and post-structuralist theory as it applied to literature, film, gender, and culture. "Continental") theorists and revolutionary post-structuralists who mesmerized academics worldwide, mostly during the 1960s and 70s. Say what? We're talking about all of those French (a.k.a. Kristeva is from the old school of French theorists. According to Kristeva, we have to control all of these disruptions to the purity of our bodies in order to maintain the boundaries between self and other, and to be part of the social order. Humans reject and want to see those unpleasantries as separate from themselves. Kristeva's big theory was her theory of the "abject," which is concerned with the body's way of managing all of its, well, unsavory products-like excrement, urine, saliva, tears, and other fluidy things. What will those theorists come up with next? Yup: Kristeva writes about things like vomit, and she comes up with a theory about how icky it is when milk forms that creepy film when it's been sitting around for too long.
Now, Kristeva hits on some great topics: revolution, disgust, melancholy, love-oh, and lots of horror. One implication of this is that when we read books, we not only receive information on the subject at hand, but we may also gain some insight about the author him- or herself. That also means that literature never has one neat, single, closed meaning: there are many interpretations available for any given text. According to them, words and definitions can never be absolute. Not all of her work is beach reading, but her topics are usually pretty juicy-once you get past some of the dense post-structuralist language.Ĭonfused already? Well, post-structuralists believe that words only have meaning relative to other words and experiences. If you like whip-smart rebellious women, you're gonna get a real kick out of Julia Kristeva.
0 kommentar(er)
