William Faulkner / The Nobel Prize in Literature 1949

William Faulkner, 1954
Photo by Carl Van Vechten

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William Faulkner

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1949

American short story writer, novelist, best known for his Yoknapatawpha cycle, a comédie humaine of the American South, which started in 1929 with SARTORIS / FLAGS IN THE DUST and completed with THE MANSION in 1959. Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. Faulkner's style is not very easy-in this he has connections to European literary modernism. His sentences are long and hypnotic, sometimes he withholds important details, or refers to people or events that the reader will not learn about until much later.

26 rue Serrandoni, Paris 6

              "The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies." (from Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 1959)

William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, as the oldest of four sons of Murray Charles Faulkner and Maud (Butler) Faulkner. While he was still a child, the family settled in Oxford in north-central Mississippi. Faulkner lived most of his life in the town. About the age of 13, he began to write poetry. At the Oxford High School he played quarterback on football team and suffered a broken nose. Before graduating, he dropped out school and worked briefly in his grandfather's bank.

After being rejected from the army because he was too short (5' 5''), Faulkner enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and had basic training in Toronto. He served with the RAF in World War I, but did not see any action. The war was over before he could make his first solo flight. This did not stop him later telling that he was shot down in France. After the war he studied literature at the University of Mississippi for a short time. He also wrote some poems and drew cartoons for the university's humor magazine, The Scream. "I liked the cartoons better than the poetry," recalled later George W. Healy Jr., who edited the magazine. In 1920 Faulkner left the university without taking a degree. Years later he wrote in a letter, "what an amazing gift I had: uneducated in every formal sense, without even very literate, let alone literary, companions, yet to have made the things I made."

Faulkner moved to New York City, where he worked as a clerk in a bookstore, and then returned to Oxford. For a time Faulkner supported himself as a postmaster at the University of Mississippi, but was fired for reading on the job. He drifted to New Orleans, where Sherwood Anderson encouraged him to write fiction rather than poetry.

The early works of Faulkner bear witness to his reading of Keats, Tennyson, Swinburne, and the fin-de-siècle English poetry. His first book was THE MARBLE FAUN (1924), a collection of poems. It did not gain success. After a hiatus in Paris, he published SOLDIER'S PAY (1926). The novel centered on the return of a soldier, who has been physically and psychologically disabled in WW I. It was followed by MOSQUITOES, a satirical portrait of Bohemian life, artist and intellectuals, in New Orleans.

In 1929 Faulkner wrote Sartoris, the first of fifteen novels set in Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional region of Mississippi-actually Yoknapatawpha was Lafayette County. The Chickasaw Indian term meant "water passes slowly through flatlands." Sartoris was later reissued entitled FLAGS IN THE DUST (1973). The Yoknapatawpha novels spanned the decades of economic decline from the American Civil War through the Depression. Racism, class division, family as both life force and curse, are the recurring themes along with recurring characters and places. Faulkner used various writing styles. The narrative varies from the traditional storytelling (LIGHT IN AUGUST) to series of snapshots (AS I LAY DYING) or collage (THE SOUND AND THE FURY). GO DOWN, MOSES (1942) was a short story cycle about Yoknapatawpha blacks and includes one of Faulkner's most frequently anthologized stories, 'The Bear', about a ritual hunt, standing as a symbol of accepting traditional cultural values.

ABSALOM, ABSALOM!, generally considered Faulkner's masterpiece. It recods a range of voices and vocabularies, all trying to unravel the mysteries of Thomas Sutpen's violent life. "Hemingway," Faulkner said once, "has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."

In 1929 Faulkner married Estelle Oldham Franklin, his childhood sweetheart, who had divorced his first husband, a lawyer. Next year he purchased the traditional Southern pillared house in Oxford, which he named Rowan Oak. Architecture was important for the author-he obsessively restored his own house, named his books after buildings ('the mansion'), and depicted them carefully: "It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street." (from 'A Rose for Emily')

With The Sound and the Fury (1929), his first masterwork, Faulkner gained recognition as a writer. Its title originated from the famous lines in Shakespeare's play Macbeth: "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing."

While working at an electrical power station in a nightshift job, Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying (1930), about the illness, death, and burial of Addie Bundren. The book consists of interior monologues, most of them spoken by members of the Bundren family. The deceased herself has one monologue; her dying wish is to be buried in her home town. Struggling through flood and fire the family carries her coffin to the graveyard in Jefferson, Mississippi. Ultimately, the journey becomes Addie's curse. "Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever." Cash, Addie's son, breaks his leg, Darl, another son, attempts to cremate his mother's body by setting fire to the barn, and Dewey Dell is raped in the cellar of a pharmacy. Addie is buried next to her father in the family plot. Darl's sanity dies with her mother and he is taken finally to an asylum. Anse, the father, appears with a woman, introducing her as the new 'Mrs Bundren'.

SANCTUARY (1931), dedicated to Sherwood Anderson for services rendered, was according to the author "deliberately conceived to make money." In the story a young woman is raped by a murderer. She finds sanctuary in a brothel. In these and the following works Faulkner experimented with methods of narration, using page-long sentences, and forcing the reader to hold in mind details and phrases that are meaningful only at the end of the story.

In 1933 Faulkner started to take flying lessons and he bought his own plane. To earn money and support Estelle, their three children, and some of the Oldhams, Faulker worked over the next 20 years in Hollywood on several screenplays, from Today We Live (1933) to Land of the Pharaos (1955). His own stories were for the conservative producers too daring: they dealt with rape, incest, suicide etc. Between scriptwriting Faulkner published several novel. PYLON (1934) was a story of four adults and a child, who travel from air show to another. Absalom, Absalom! concentrated on Thomas Sutpen's attempts to found a Southern dynasty in the 19th-century Mississippi. THE WILD PALMS (1939) was a story of the Snopes family, in which the character McCord is based on Ernest Hemingway and parallels A Farwell to Arms. GO DOWN MOSES, AND OTHER STORIES (1942) contained 'The Bear', one of his most celebrates pieces of short fiction.

"He wrote A Fable in my house. He'd be typing away in the middle of the night. Worked right on the typewriter, typed all night. I walked in on him, asked him what he was working on there in the middle of the night. He said, "Oh... on a novel." "Well... what's it about?" He said, "Oh, it's about Jesus Christ coming to earth during the World War." ( A.I. Bezzerides in The Big Book of Noir, ed. by Ed Gorman, Lee Server and Martin H. Greenberg, 1998)

By 1945, when Faulkner's novels were out of print, he moved again to Hollywood to write under contract movie scripts, mostly for director Howard Hawks. He had read Faulkner's 1926 novel Soldier's Pay when it had just appeared and recommended it to his friends. In the early 1930s Faulkner had written for the director an adaptation from his short story 'Turn About'. Their first meeting ended in heavy drinking, and started a long friendship. "Just a year apart in age, with Hawks the senior, both were reserved to the point of noncommunicativemess; Nunnally Johnson was astonished by the sight of the two of them just sitting together not saying a word. When they did talk, they did do slowly, in a drawling manner." (Todd McCarthy in Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, 1997) Faulkner cooperated with Hawks among others in the films To Have and Have Not (1944), based freely on Ernest Hemingway's novel, and The Big Sleep (1946), based on Raymond Chandler's novel. When Hemingway had turned down Hawk's offer to work with his own book, the director had said, "I'll get Faulkner to do it; he can write better than you can anyway."

Faulkner's second period of success started in 1946 with the publication of THE PORTABLE FAULKNER, which rescued him from near-oblivion. However, Faulkner's physique and mental functioning was weakened by hard drinking. "When I have one martini I feel bigger, wiser, taller," he confessed. "When I have a second I feel superlative. After that there's no holding me." Besides problems with alcohol his wife's drug addiction and declining health shadowed his life. "I will always believe that my first responsibility is to the artist, the work," he wrote in a letter; "it is terrible that my wife does not realise or at least accept that." Their daughter Jill later said that "Nothing about the marriage was right."

Moreover, Hollywood was not the best refuge from domestic problems, because Faulkner also had there series of affairs, among others with Meta Carpenter Wilde, a script girl, who wrote a book about their relationship. Faulkner did not hide his fear and contempt of the city: "Sometimes I think if I do one more treatment or screenplay, I'll lose whatever power I have as a writer," he told Carpenter. Faulkner published in 1951 REQUIEM FOR A NUN, and badly received magnum opus A FABLE in 1954. THE TOWN (1957) and THE MANSION (1959) continued the story of the Snopes family, which he had begun in 1940 in THE HAMLET. With THE REIVERS (1962), set early in the 20th-century, Faulkner nostalgically revisited his childhood, and extends the world of Sanctuary. On June 17, 1962, he was thrown from a horse, and a few weeks later, on July 6, Faulkner died of a coronary occlusion. The New York Times cited his critics in his obituary and stated that "Mr. Faulkner's writings showed an obsession with murder, rape, incest, suicide, greed and general depravity that did not exist anywhere but in the author's mind". (July 7, 1962) Fourty-three years later, in his review of Jay Parini's book One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner (2004) the Nobel writer J.M. Coetzee defined Faulkner not only as "the most radical innovator in the annals of American fiction," but "a writer to whom the avant-garde of Europe and Latin America would go to school." (The New York Review of Books, April 7, 2005)

Oxford, Mississippi

For further reading

William Faulkner: His South by R.P. Warren (1951); William Faulkner: A Critical Study by I. Howe (1952); The Literary Career of William Faulkner by J.B. Meriwether (1961); William Faulkner by C. Brooks (1963); A Reader's Guide to William Faulkner by E.L. Volpe (1964); Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by R.P. Warren (1966); Faulkner: A Biography by J.L. Blotner (1974, 2 vols.); William Faulkner by W. Beck (1976); A Loving Gentleman by Meta Carpenter Wilde and Orin Borsten (1976); William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond by C. Brooks (1978); William Faulkner, His Life and Work by D. Minter (1980); The Origins of Faulkner's Art by J.L. Sensibar (1984); William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Fiction, ed. by A. Robert Lee (1987); Faulkner's Apocrypha by Joseph R. Urgo (1989); The Feminine and Faulkner by Minrose C. Gwin (1990); Faulkner's Subject by Philip M. Weinstein (1992); Critical Essays on William Faulkner, ed. by Arthur F. Kinney (1996); William Faulkner and the Tangible Past: The Architecture of Yoknapatawpha by Thomas S. Hines (1997); Existential-Phenomenological Readings on Faulkner by William J. Sowder (1997), Faulkner: Masks and Metaphors by Lothar Honninghausen (1997), Faulkner. The Return of the Repressed by Doreen Fowler (1997); Conversations with William Faulkner, ed. by M. Thomas Inge (1999); One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner by Jay Parini (2004) - See: publications of Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series: Faulkner and Gender; Faulkner and Psychology; Faulkner and Ideology; Faulkner and the Short Story; Faulkner and Natural World; Faulkner and the Artist; Faulkner in Cultural Context - See also: Little Blue Light, Ben Hecht, Tennessee Williams, Raymond Chandler, Sherwood Anderson - Note: Toni Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, wrote her thesis at Cornell University on Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. - James Hadley Chase based his famous mystery story No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939) on Faulkner's Sanctuary.

Selected works

•          THE MARBLE FAUN, 1924

•          SOLDIER'S PAY, 1926

•          MOSQUITOES, 1927

•          SARTORIS / FLAGS IN THE DUST, 1929 (first in Yoknapatawpha cycle)

•          THE SOUND AND THE FURY, 1929  - film 1959, dir. by Martin Ritt, screenplay by Harriet Frank Jr., starring Yul Brynner, Joanne Woodward, Margaret Leighton

•          AS I LAY DYING, 1930

•          SANCTUARY, 1931 films: The Story of Temple Drake (1933), dir. by Stephen Roberts, starring Miriam Hopkins, Jack La Rue, William Gargan; 1960, dir. by Tony Richardson, starring Lee Remick. Bradford Dillman, Yves Montand, based on Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun

•          LIGHT IN AUGUST, 1932

•          screenplay with others: TODAY WE LIVE, 1933

•          screenplay: LAZY RIVER, 1934 (uncredited)

•          PYLON, 1935 - film The Tarnished Angels (1957), dir. by Douglas Sirk, adaptation by George Zuckerman, starring Rock Hudson, Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, Jack Carson

•          ABSALOM, ABSALOM!, 1936 - Absalom, Absalom (suom. Kai Kaila)

•          screenplay: SUTTER'S GOLD, 1936 (unused treatment)

•          screenplay: BANJO ON MY KNEE, 1936 (uncredited)

•          screenplay with others: THE ROAD TO GLORY, 1936 (see also Nunnally Johnson) 

•          screenplay: SLAVE SHIP, 1937 (unused)

•          screenplay: SUBMARINE PATROL, 1938 (unused)

•          THE UNVANQUISHED, 1938 - Voittamattomat (suom. Paavo Lehtonen)

•          screenplay: FOUR MEN AND A PRAYER, 1938 (minor treatment)

•          screenplay: GUNGA DIN, 1939 (uncredited)

•          screenplay: DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK, 1939 (uncredited)

•          THE WILD PALMS, 1939 - Villipalmut (trans. into Finnish by Alex Matson)

•          THE HAMLET, 1940 - Kylä (suom. Kai Kaila) - film The Long Hot Summer (1958), dir. by Martin Ritt, screenplay by Irving Ravetch, starring Orson Welles, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Anthony Franciosa, Lee Remick, Angela Lansbury; TVseries The Long, Hot Summer (1965-1966), starring Roy Thinnes, Nancy Malone, Paul Geary, Ruth Roman, Lana Wood; TV series (1985), starring Don Johnson, Jason Robards, Judith Ivey, Cybill Shepherd, Ava Gardner

•          GO DOWN, MOSES, 1942

•          screenplay: AIR FORCE, 1943 (uncredited)

•          screenplay: BACKGROUND TO DANGER, 1943 (script revisions)

•          screenplay: NORTHERN PURSUIT, 1943 (uncredited)

•          screenplay with others: TO HAVE AND TO HAVE NOT, 1944-45

•          screenplay: THE SOUTHENER, 1945 (uncredited)

•          screenplay: MILDRED PIERCE, 1945 (uncredited)

•          THE PORTABLE FAULKNER, 1946

•          screenplay with others: THE BIG SLEEP, 1946

•          screenplay: STALLION ROAD, 1947 (uncredited)

•          screenplay: DEEP VALLEY, 1947 (uncredited)

•          INTRUDER IN THE DUST, 1948 - film 1949, dir. by Clarence Brown, adaptation by Ben Maddow, starring Juano Hernandez, Claude Jarman Jr. and Elizabeth Patterson

•          screenplay: THE ADVENTURES OF DON JUAN, 1948 (uncredited)

•          KNIGHT'S GAMBIT, 1949

•          COLLECTED STORIES, 1950

•          screenplay: THE DAMNED DON'T CRY, 1950 (uncredited, partly based on the story The Brooch)

•          REQUIEM FOR A NUN, 1951

•          A FABLE, 1954 (Pulitzer Prize)

•          screenplay with others: LAND OF THE PHARAOHS, 1955 (born in the wake of Mika Waltari's bestseller novel The Egyptian, film 1954, dir. by Michael Curtiz)

•          screenplay: THE LEFT HAND OF GOD, 1955 (unused)

•          THE TOWN, 1957 - Kaupunki (suom. Kai Kaila)

•          THE MANSION, 1959 - Kartano (suom. Kai Kaila)

•          THE REIVERS, 1962 (Pulitzer Prize) - Rosvot (suom. Kai Kaila) - film 1970, dir. by Mark Rydell, screenplay by Harriet Frank Jr., starring Steve McQueen, Sharon Farrell, Will Geer, Michael Constantine, Ruth White

•          WILLIAM FAULKNER: EARLY PROSE AND POETRY, 1962

•          FAULKNER AT WEST POINT, 1964

•          ESSAYS, SPEECHES AND PUBLIC LETTERS, 1966

•          THE FAULKNER-COWLEY FILE, 1968

•          FLAGS IN THE DUST, 1973

•          THE MARIONETTES, 1975

•          MAYDAY, 1977

•          SELECTED LETTERS OF WILLIAM FAULKNER, 1977

•          UNCOLLECTED STORIES OF WILLIAM FAULKNER, 1979

•          SANCTUARY: THE ORIGINAL TEXT, 1981 (edited by Noel Polk)

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/faulkner.htm

Julia Kristeva

DRAGON

Julia Kristeva was communist secret agent, Bulgaria claims
The ideas inteview / Julia Kristeva

DE OTROS MUNDOS

Julia Kristeva / "Quien no está enamorado ni se psicoanaliza, está muerto"
Julia Kristeva / Teoría de la melancolía

De la languidez al pesimismo / Tiempo de melancolía

Julia Kristeva / Teoría, proceso e interpretación del sentido

Julia Kristeva / Acusada de espía del régimen comunista de Bulgaria

RIMBAUD
Julia Kristeva / Communiqué
Roland Barthes / Julia Kristeva, l’étrangère

BIOGRAFÍAS

Julia Kristeva / Ciudadana europea

(1941)

Born  24 June 1941 (age 74) (1941-06-24) Sliven, Bulgaria Alma mater  University of Sofia (and others) Awards  Holberg International Memorial Prize Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought VIZE 97 Prize Era  Contemporary philosophy Spouse  Philippe Sollers (m. 1967) Parents  Stoyan Kristev, Christine Kristeva Books  Powers of Horror, Desire in language, Black Sun: Depression and Mela, Strangers to Ourselves, Revolution in poetic language

Julia Kristeva ([kʁisteva]; Bulgarian: Юлия Кръстева; born 24 June 1941) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She is now a professor emeritus at the University Paris Diderot. The author of more than 30 books, including Revolution in Poetic Language, Tales of Love, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Proust and the Sense of Time, the trilogy Female Genius, she has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Vaclav Havel Prize.

Kristeva became influential in international critical analysis, cultural studies and feminism after publishing her first book, Semeiotikè, in 1969. Her sizeable body of work includes books and essays which address intertextuality, the semiotic, and abjection, in the fields of linguistics, literary theory and criticism, psychoanalysis, biography and autobiography, political and cultural analysis, art and art history. She is prominent in structuralist and poststructuralist thought.

Kristeva is also the founder and head of the Simone de Beauvoir Prize committee.

Julia kristeva trange trang re

Life

Born in Sliven, Bulgaria to Christian parents, Kristeva is the daughter of a church accountant. Kristeva and her sister attended a Francophone school run by Dominican nuns. Kristeva became acquainted with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin at this time in Bulgaria. Kristeva went on to study at the University of Sofia, and while a postgraduate there obtained a research fellowship that enabled her to move to France in December 1965, when she was 24. She continued her education at several French universities, studying under Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes, among other scholars. On August 2, 1967, Kristeva married the novelist Philippe Sollers, né Philippe Joyaux.

Kristeva taught at Columbia University in the early 1970s, and remains a Visiting Professor. She has also published under the married name Julia Joyaux.

Work

After joining the 'Tel Quel group' founded by Sollers, Kristeva focused on the politics of language and became an active member of the group. She trained in psychoanalysis, and earned her degree in 1979. In some ways, her work can be seen as trying to adapt a psychoanalytic approach to the poststructuralist criticism. For example, her view of the subject, and its construction, shares similarities with Sigmund Freud and Lacan. However, Kristeva rejects any understanding of the subject in a structuralist sense; instead, she favors a subject always "in process" or "on trial". In this way, she contributes to the poststructuralist critique of essentialized structures, whilst preserving the teachings of psychoanalysis. She travelled to China in the 1970s and later wrote About Chinese Women (1977).

The "semiotic" and the "symbolic"

One of Kristeva's most important contributions is that signification is composed of two elements, the symbolic and the semiotic, the latter being distinct from the discipline of semiotics founded by Ferdinand de Saussure. As explained by Augustine Perumalil, Kristeva's "semiotic is closely related to the infantile pre-Oedipal referred to in the works of Freud, Otto Rank, Melanie Klein, British Object Relation psychoanalysis, and Lacan's pre-mirror stage. It is an emotional field, tied to the instincts, which dwells in the fissures and prosody of language rather than in the denotative meanings of words." Furthermore, according to Birgit Schippers, the semiotic is a realm associated with the musical, the poetic, the rhythmic, and that which lacks structure and meaning. It is closely tied to the "feminine", and represents the undifferentiated state of the pre-Mirror Stage infant.

Upon entering the Mirror Stage, the child learns to distinguish between self and other, and enters the realm of shared cultural meaning, known as the symbolic. In Desire in Language (1980), Kristeva describes the symbolic as the space in which the development of language allows the child to become a "speaking subject," and to develop a sense of identity separate from the mother. This process of separation is known as abjection, whereby the child must reject and move away from the mother in order to enter into the world of language, culture, meaning, and the social. This realm of language is called the symbolic and is contrasted with the semiotic in that it is associated with the masculine, the law, and structure. Kristeva departs from Lacan in the idea that even after entering the symbolic, the subject continues to oscillate between the semiotic and the symbolic. Therefore, rather than arriving at a fixed identity, the subject is permanently "in process". Because female children continue to identify to some degree with the mother figure, they are especially likely to retain a close connection to the semiotic. This continued identification with the mother may result in what Kristeva refers to in Black Sun (1989) as melancholia (depression), given that female children simultaneously reject and identify with the mother figure.

It has also been suggested (e.g., Creed, 1993) that the degradation of women and women's bodies in popular culture (and particularly, for example, in slasher films) emerges because of the threat to identity that the mother's body poses: it is a reminder of time spent in the undifferentiated state of the semiotic, where one has no concept of self or identity. After abjecting the mother, subjects retain an unconscious fascination with the semiotic, desiring to reunite with the mother, while at the same time fearing the loss of identity that accompanies it. Slasher films thus provide a way for audience members to safely reenact the process of abjection by vicariously expelling and destroying the mother figure.

Kristeva is also known for her adoption of Plato’s idea of the chora, meaning "a nourishing maternal space" (Schippers, 2011). Kristeva’s idea of the chora has been interpreted in several ways: as a reference to the uterus, as a metaphor for the relationship between the mother and child, and as the temporal period preceding the Mirror Stage. In her essay Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini from Desire in Language (1980), Kristeva refers to the chora as a "non-expressive totality formed by drives and their stases in a motility that is full of movement as it is regulated." She goes on to suggest that it is the mother's body that mediates between the chora and the symbolic realm: the mother has access to culture and meaning, yet also forms a totalizing bond with the child.

Kristeva is also noted for her work on the concept of intertextuality.

Anthropology and psychology

Kristeva argues that anthropology and psychology, or the connection between the social and the subject, do not represent each other, but rather follow the same logic: the survival of the group and the subject. Furthermore, in her analysis of Oedipus, she claims that the speaking subject cannot exist on his/her own, but that he/she "stands on the fragile threshold as if stranded on account of an impossible demarcation" (Powers of Horror, p. 85).

In her comparison between the two disciplines, Kristeva claims that the way in which an individual excludes the abject mother as a means of forming an identity, is the same way in which societies are constructed. On a broader scale, cultures exclude the maternal and the feminine, and by this come into being.

Feminist

Kristeva has been regarded as a key proponent of French feminism together with Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray. Kristeva has had a remarkable influence on feminism and feminist literary studies in the US and the UK, as well as on readings into contemporary art although her relation to feminist circles and movements in France has been quite controversial. Kristeva made a famous disambiguation of three types of feminism in "Women's Time" in New Maladies of the Soul (1993); while rejecting the first two types, including that of Beauvoir, her stands are sometimes considered rejecting feminism altogether. Kristeva proposed the idea of multiple sexual identities against the joined code of "unified feminine language".

Denunciation of identity politics

Kristeva argues her writings have been misunderstood by American feminist academics. In Kristeva's view, it was not enough simply to dissect the structure of language in order to find its hidden meaning. Language should also be viewed through the prisms of history and of individual psychic and sexual experiences. This post-structuralist approach enabled specific social groups to trace the source of their oppression to the very language they used. However, Kristeva believes that it is harmful to posit collective identity above individual identity, and that this political assertion of sexual, ethnic, and religious identities is ultimately totalitarian.

Novelist

Kristeva wrote a number of novels that resemble detective stories. While the books maintain narrative suspense and develop a stylized surface, her readers also encounter ideas intrinsic to her theoretical projects. Her characters reveal themselves mainly through psychological devices, making her type of fiction mostly resemble the later work of Dostoevsky. Her fictional oeuvre, which includes The Old Man and the Wolves, Murder in Byzantium, and Possessions, while often allegorical, also approaches the autobiographical in some passages, especially with one of the protagonists of Possessions, Stephanie Delacour—a French journalist—who can be seen as Kristeva's alter ego. Murder in Byzantium deals with themes from orthodox Christianity and politics; she referred to it as "a kind of anti-Da Vinci Code".

Honors

For her "innovative explorations of questions on the intersection of language, culture and literature", Kristeva was awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2004. She won the 2006 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. She has also been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, and the Vaclav Havel Prize.

Scholarly reception

Roman Jakobson said that "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,' and her contrary gift of releasing various 'damned questions' from their traditional question marks."

Roland Barthes comments that "Julia Kristeva changes the place of things: she always destroys the last prejudice, the one you thought you could be reassured by, could be take [sic] pride in; what she displaces is the already-said, the déja-dit, i.e., the instance of the signified, i.e., stupidity; what she subverts is authority -the authority of monologic science, of filiation."

Ian Almond criticizes Kristeva's ethnocentrism. He cites Gayatri Spivak's conclusion that Kristeva's book About Chinese Women "belongs to that very eighteenth century [that] Kristeva scorns" after pinpointing "the brief, expansive, often completely ungrounded way in which she writes about two thousand years of a culture she is unfamiliar with". Almond notes the absence of sophistication in Kristeva's remarks concerning the Muslim world and the dismissive terminology she uses to describe its culture and believers. He criticizes Kristeva's opposition which juxtaposes "Islamic societies" against "democracies where life is still fairly pleasant" by pointing out that Kristeva displays no awareness of the complex and nuanced debate ongoing among women theorists in the Muslim world, and that she does not refer to anything other than the Rushdie fatwa in dismissing the entire Muslim faith as "reactionary and persecutory".

In Intellectual Impostures (1997), physics professors Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont devote a chapter to Kristeva's use of mathematics in her writings. They argue that Kristeva fails to show the relevance of the mathematical concepts she discusses to linguistics and the other fields she studies, and that no such relevance exists.

Selected writings

Séméiôtiké: recherches pour une sémanalyse, Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1969. (English translation: Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980.)

La Révolution Du Langage Poétique: L'avant-Garde À La Fin Du Xixe Siècle, Lautréamont Et Mallarmé. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974. (Abridged English translation: Revolution in Poetic Language, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.)

About Chinese Women. London: Boyars, 1977.

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

The Kristeva Reader. (ed. Toril Moi) Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.

In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.

Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Columbia University Press,1991.

Nations without Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

New Maladies of the Soul. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

"Experiencing the Phallus as Extraneous." parallax issue 8, 1998.

Crisis of the European Subject. New York: Other Press, 2000.

Reading the Bible. In: David Jobling, Tina Pippin & Ronald Schleifer (eds). The Postmodern Bible Reader. (pp. 92–101). Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words: Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, Colette: A Trilogy. 3 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

Hannah Arendt: Life is a Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

Hatred and Forgiveness. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

The Severed Head: Capital Visions. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

Marriage as a Fine Art (with Philippe Sollers). New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

Other books on Julia Kristeva:

Irene Ivantcheva-Merjanska, Ecrire dans la langue de l'autre. Assia Djebar et Julia Kristeva. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2015.

Jennifer Radden, The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva, Oxford University Press, 2000.

Megan Becker-Leckrone, Julia Kristeva And Literary Theory, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Sara Beardsworth, Julia Kristeva, Psychoanalysis and Modernity, Suny Press, 2004. (2006 Goethe Award Psychoanalytic Scholarship, finalist for the best book published in 2004.)

Kelly Ives, Julia Kristeva: Art, Love, Melancholy, Philosophy, Semiotics and Psychoanalysis, Crescent Moon Publishing Édition, 2010.

Kelly Oliver, Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva's Writing, Routledge Édition, 1993.

Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-bind, Indiana University Press, 1993.

John Lechte, Maria Margaroni, Julia Kristeva: Live Theory , Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd, 2005.

Noëlle McAfee, Julia Kristeva, Routledge, 2003.

Griselda Pollock (Guest Editor) Julia Kristeva 1966-1996, Parallax Issue 8, 1998.

Anna Smith, Julia Kristeva: Readings of Exile and Estrangement, Palgrave Macmillan, 1996.

David Crownfield, Body/Text in Julia Kristeva: Religion, Women, and Psychoanalysis, State University of New York Press, 1992.

Novels

The Samurai: A Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.

The Old Man and the Wolves. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Possessions: A Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Murder in Byzantium. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

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