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...

The linking of psychosomatic to literary and literary to a larger political horizon raises the question of conservative premises to linguistic, pyschoanalystic, philisophical, and literary theories and criticisms of such.

-- "Voice Literary Supplement"

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.

In Black Sun, Julia Kristeva addresses the subject of melancholia, examining this phenomenon in the context of art, literature, philosophy, the history of religion and culture, as well as psychoanalysis. She describes the depressive as one who perceives the sense of self as a crucial pursuit and a nearly unattainable goal and explains how the love of a lost identity of attachment lies at the very core of depression's dark heart.

In her discussion she analyzes Holbein's controversial 1522 painting "The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb," and has revealing comments on the works of...

This book is concerned with the notion of the "stranger" -the foreigner, outsider, or alien in a country and society not their own- as well as the notion of strangeness within the self -a person's deep sense of being, as distinct from outside appearance and their conscious idea of self.

Kristeva begins with the personal and moves outward by examining world literature and philosophy. She discusses the foreigner in Greek tragedy, in the Bible, and in the literature of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and the twentieth century. She discusses the legal status of foreigners...

Part detective story, part fable, this novel takes the reader to a mythical post-industrial city where the boundaries between East and West, civilization and barbarianism have been erased.

Kristeva points to Montesquieu's esprit general -- his notion of the social body as a guaranteed hierarchy of private rights -- in this humanistic plea for tolerance and commonality.

Noted literary critic, psychoanalyst, and theorist Julia Kristeva presents a thoroughly original and compelling reading of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, just delivered at the 1992 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at Canterbury. Kristeva's first essay, "Proust and Time Embodied," takes a broadly psychoanalytical, linguistically sensitive approach to Proust's exploration of time and the operation of memory. Next in "In Search of Madeline," she delves into Proust's concept of the little cake that flooded him with the taste of childhood regained, providing an explanation for Proust's...

These days, who still has a soul? asks Julia Kristeva in her psychoanalytic exploration, New Maladies of the Soul. Hailed by Peter Brooks in the New York Times as "a critic of great psychoanalytic insight," Kristeva reveals to readers a new kind of patient, symptomatic of an age of political upheaval, mass-mediated culture, and the dramatic overhaul of familial and sexual mores. The book poses a troubling question about the human subject in the West today: Is the psychic space that we have traditionally known disappearing?