Julia Kristeva and Female Genius

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Melanie Klein ◽  
French Theory

This chapter turns to Julia Kristeva's discussion of female genius. It presents Kristeva's three biographical studies of Hannah Arendt (1999), Melanie Klein (2000), and Colette (2002), published under the collective title Le Génie feminine. Her perspective is predominantly psychoanalytic as she approaches her subject with a certain boldness as she treats female genius as a given rather than defensively pleading the cause. Hence, collectively, the trilogy offers a psychoanalytically grounded account of gender and femininity as part of its reflection on genius. Genius takes a new, explicitly gendered form here and it does so thanks to the mix of literary criticism, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis that is characteristic of the later years of “French theory.”

Julia Kristeva's Feminist Revolutions

Hypatia ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 94-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly Oliver
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Women's Oppression

Julia Kristeva is known as rejecting feminism, nonetheless her work is useful for feminist theory. I reconsider Kristeva's rejection of feminism and her theories of difference, identity, and maternity, elaborating on Kristeva's contributions to debates over the necessity of identity politics, indicating how Kristeva's theory suggests the cause of and possible solutions to women's oppression in Western culture, and, using Kristeva's theory, setting up a framework for a feminist rethinking of politics and ethics.

Afterword: Turning Back to Literature

PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (4) ◽  
pp. 1087-1095 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Caruth
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Future ◽  
Literary Writing ◽  
Literary Archive

Three times I rushed, and my heart urged me to hold her, and three times she flew from my hands like a shadow or even a dream.—Homer, The Odyssey 11.206–08.To speak of the future of literary criticism is always to speak of the future of literature, which is a mode of language and an institution whose very being essentially touches on the possibility and fragility of its own future. “The fragility of literature,” as Richard Klein suggests, “its susceptibility to being lost,” is at the heart of all literary writing, which emerges from the absence of a “real referent” and thus sustains itself through its reference to other texts, to the archive of literary writing that is made up of figures and other literary articulations that allow us to read. Klein reminds us, citing Jacques Derrida, that literary texts may always disappear: not only because they may be forgotten but also because they are susceptible to the erasure of the archive, to apocalyptic destruction, and to the collective loss of the knowledge of how to read—as a result of new modes of media saturation or, I would add, through the collapse of readability in the age of what Hannah Arendt calls “the modern lie” (“Truth” 253). The force and fragility of literature and of literary criticism are bound up with the possible disappearance of the literary archive, which we implicitly confront in reading literature and in pursuing its forms and thoughts as literary critics.

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