Julia Kristeva Readings of Exile and Estrangement [Paperback]

Literature can have a disturbing effect on its readers. It unsettles our hold on everyday experience and makes us strangers and exiles. Anna Smith argues that this is the side of literature which attracts critic and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. Kristeva is drawn to states of extremity where language and the psyche are under duress, and in this book Smith examines the way the alchemical properties of words may transform these extremities into what Kristeva calls 'a fire of tongues, an exit from representation'.Acknowledgements - Abbreviations - Introduction - PART 1: INTRODUCING THE SUBJECT - 'Strangers to Ourselves' - The Space of Travel: Reading and the Female Voyager - PART 2: SPEAKING IN TONGUES - 'Language the Unknown' - 'Into the Cellar of the Native House': Kristeva and Psychoanalysis - Changing the Alphabet: Event as Revelation - Selected Bibliography - Notes - IndexANNA SMITH