Description: Julia Kristeva embarks on a wide-ranging and stimulating inquiry into Dostoyevsky's work and the profound ways it has influenced her own thinking.
Brief description: Julia Kristeva is professor emerita of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII. A renowned psychoanalyst, philosopher, and linguist, she has written dozens of books spanning semiotics, political theory, literary criticism, gender and sex, and cultural critique, as well as several novels and autobiographical works, published in English translation by Columbia University Press. Kristeva was the inaugural recipient of the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2004 "for innovative explorations of questions on the intersection of language, culture, and literature."
Review Quotes: Part spiritual autobiography, part free association, Kristeva's study of Dostoyevsky becomes the occasion for a journey through the life of the mind. In searing harmony with her subject, she once again demonstrates how it is only out of the depths of abjection that human creativity is born. One of her most exuberant and challenging works, Dostoyevsky, or The Flood of Language offers us Dostoyevsky as lascivious, blasphemous, and saint, taking us into the core of Kristeva's unique vision.--Jacqueline Rose, author of On Violence and On Violence Against Women