Revolution In Poetic Language Fifty Years Later

In her 1974 Revolution in Poetic Language, Julia Kristeva resisted the abstract use of language, with its aim of totalization and finality, in all its colonizing and alienating forms. A major thinker and critic, Kristeva reappropriated Hegel's concepts of desire and negativity, in conjunction with the thought of Heidegger, Arendt, Freud, and Lacan, to revolt against modernity's culture of nihilism and the West's inability to deal with loss. This collection celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of Revolution in Poetic Language by revisiting Kristeva's oeuvre and establishing exciting new directions in Kristeva studies. Engaging with queer and transgender studies, disability studies, decolonial studies, and more, renowned and rising scholars plot continuities in—and push the boundaries of—Kristeva's thinking about loss, revolution, and revolt. The volume also includes two essays by Kristeva, translated into English for the first time here—"The Impossibility of Loss" (1988) and "Of What Use Are Poets in Times of Distress?" (2016).

In Revolution in Poetic Language, Julia Kristeva explicates her foundational distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic and explores their interrelationships. Linking the psychosomatic to the literary and the literary to a larger political horizon, she questions the premises of linguistic, psychoanalytic, philosophical, and literary theories.

In Language and Politics in Julia Kristeva, Carol Mastrangelo Bové explores how Kristeva's theoretical and fictional writings contribute to an understanding of contemporary personal and international conflicts. In addition to examining Kristeva's turn to Eastern models—both Russian and Chinese—in thinking through a critique of symbolic language in Western patriarchal psychic formations, Bové also contributes to the debate over essentialism through innovative interpretations of such major works of twentieth-century French culture as Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Simone de Beauvoir's She Came to Stay, François Truffaut's Jules and Jim, and Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game. Bové argues that the links between the body and the female, on the one hand, and authority and the male, on the other, are psychologically constructed, and are not necessarily or exclusively biological. The book concludes with an examination of Kristeva's Colette.

Highly original and theoretically wide-ranging, this book offers new insights into the origins of poetry. Working with much of the significant primary and secondary literature in psychoanalysis, particularly the theories of Julia Kristeva, the book skillfully sketches out a psychoanalytically enhanced theory of poetics through close readings of the works of Dylan Thomas. Through an intense dialogue with pivotal poems, it offers a "subjectivist" theory of poetic language, one that focuses on the interrelation between meaning and subjectivity in the dynamics of the poetic text. In this scheme, the "genesis of the speaking subject" is held to be a reenactment of old and new fantasies of origins, the reality of which is inaccessible to us—buried, as it were, "below time." Among these fantasies, the author also recognizes the psychoanalytic fantasy of origins that guides her own project.

Famed and outspoken Russian poet, Maximilian Voloshin's notoriety has grown steadily since his slow release from Soviet censorship. For the first time, Landa showcases his vast poetic contributions, proving his words to be an overlooked solution both to the political and cultural turmoil engulfing the Soviet Union in the early twentieth century.

This study examines Wallace Stevens' ideas and practice of poetic language with a focus on the 1930s, an era in which Stevens persistently thematized a keenly felt pressure for the possible social involvement and political utility of poetic language. The argument suggests how mutually implicated elements of his poetry such as diction, prosody and metaphor are relied on to signify or enact aesthetic closure; both in the negative terms of expressive impotence and unethical isolation and the positive ones of imaginative and linguistic change. In this respect, the study deals closely with the epistemologically and ethically fraught issue of the ambiguous and volatile role of non-semantic elements and linguistic difficulty in Stevens' language. Assuming that these facets are not exclusive to this period but receive a very clear, and therefore instructive, formulation in it, the discussion outlines some of Stevens' most central tropes for poetic creativity at this stage of his career, suggesting ways in which they came to form part of his later discourse on poetic functionality, when polemical concepts for the imagination, such as "evasion" and "escapism," became central. Stevens' prosody is discussed from within an eclectic analytical framework in which cumulative rhythmics is complemented by traditional metrics as a way of doing justice to his rich, varied and cognitively volatile use of verse language. The expressive potency of prosodic patterning is understood both as an effect of its resistance to semantic interpretation and by assuming a formal drive to interpret them in relation to the semantic and metaphoric staging of individual poems. A poem, in turn, is understood both as a strategic, stylistically deviant response to the challenges of a particular historical moment, and as an attempt to communicate through creating a sense of linguistic resistance and otherness.