Revolution in Poetic Language (European Perspectives Series) [Paperback]

Julia Kristeva (Author), Margaret Waller (Translator), Leon S. Roudiez (Foreword)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0231056435 | ISBN-13: 978-0231056434 | Publication Date: April 15, 1984 0

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A lucid and creative consideration of the status and stakes of contemporary cultural criticism, it is essential reading for students of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--and a monumental challenge to all of us. -- Alice Jardine Harvard University

Review

Students and scholars of psychoanalysis, semiotics, linguistics, and feminist theory alike will rejoice to see Julia Kristeva's "La Revolution du langue poetique" now finally appearing in English... A crucially important book.

(Toril Moi French Studies )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 271 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press (April 15, 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231056435
• ISBN-13: 978-0231056434
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #179,419 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Huge - An Important and Rewarding Book, September 7, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Revolution in Poetic Language (European Perspectives Series) (Paperback)

The previous reviewer clearly did not understand this intricate and admittedly difficult work in the least - it is certainly NOT an example of the "emperor has no clothes" syndrome. It is, however, a challenging and complicated work that presumes a good deal of exposure to continental philosophy (especially the phenomonologies of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger) and Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis. Kristeva does an impresive and convincing - as well as constructive - job of tying together these overlapping philosophical/ideolgical traditions and ties them into notions of how a subject comes to exist as such in and through a world of language... Going behind the mis-en-abime of Lacan and beyond the linguistic monism of postsrtucturalism, Kristeva gives a living, breathing account of these different themes (of which the previous reviewer seem utterly unaware - but then again, philosophy can be hard)....more later...

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I Have to Raise the Rating!!!, August 5, 2005

By 

Zachary A. Hanson "Jazzpunk" (Tallahassee, FL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Revolution in Poetic Language (European Perspectives Series) (Paperback)

I stumbled across the three-star average for this and was appalled. Of course, it is based on one person giving a poor toss-off review and another person giving a positive review, still a toss-off. I identify with what the latter reviewer is doing here. Amazon reviews cannot do this work justice. You have to go soak this in for yourself. All I can say is that it is as life-changing as theory gets. All the rest of us can dream of being so revolutionary and lucid as Kristeva here. That is the use of this book in this era. An important use at that.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Theory as a unleashed adventure, February 24, 2007

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Sergio Natuche "Sergio Natuche" (ARGENTINA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Revolution in Poetic Language (European Perspectives Series) (Paperback)

In this great book, you will find a whirled stairway to the very innards of that stirring and shaking inquiry called theory. From Saussure to Husserl, from Plato to Freud, and taking on Chomsky, Frege, Hjelmslev and las but not least, Lacan, Kristeva undertakes a criticism which is that of the two most troubling concepts in the western thought: the subject and the sign.
In order to a new and, more and foremost, springing overture to come about, this French psychoanalyst and critic penetrates in the very core of the more intricated authors who built his theories within the sing and the subject; a sign and a subject Kristeva tears apart from the confortable room that eiher in structuralism (with Saussure and Hjelmslev, but also with Noam Chomsky) as in fenomenology (with Husserl)they reside, and finds out the semiotic, this motilities drives whiches allow a freer subject to show up in the very symbolism of language and, even with no destroy it, disrupt it from within, taking over the symbolic whereby all the socials constraints burst into the individual.
Thus, we have in this Etrangere (as Barthes named her) one of the most creative and, hence, one of the most revolutionaries thought the twentieth century give us.