Abstract
Literature brings us to the brink of existence. Its imaginary landscapes invite the reader to be a voyager filled with wonder, but the prospect of the marvellous that dazzles the eye may also open on to a dark world of terror and despair. Literature, like dreams, cannot be controlled, and disrupts the hold we have on habitual experience. When we read or write, we inevitably follow the traveller’s impulse and steer a course across unknown countries with the help of a map, yet language, and literary language most especially, creates its own ephemeral universe resistant to all that is familiar. Something in this shifting landscape escapes and alienates our travelling eye. The most intense forms of estrangement experienced by the subject, according to Julia Kristeva, are those produced by poetic language. For while its origins are implicated in the origins of subjectivity, poetic language is a fire of tongues. It has an infinite, ecstatic quality that eludes the mastery of human consciousness. The landscape of literature then, is inhabited by a foreignness that deflects the traveller and divides us from ourselves. We become, in other words, exiles.
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Notes
Beryl Schlossman, Joyce’s Catholic Comedy of Language (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 157.
Julia Kristeva, ‘Postmodernism?’, Bucknell Review, Vol. 25, No. 2 (1980), p. 140.
Michael Edwards, ‘Writing and Redemption’ in David Wood ed., Writing the Future (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 133.
Julia Kristeva, Le texte du roman, (The Hague: Mouton, 1979), p. 104.
Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), p. 283.
Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Penguin Press, 1969), p. 226.
Hélène Cixous, ‘Fiction and its Phantoms: a Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (the “Uncanny”)’, New Literary History, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Spring 1976), p. 531.
Samuel Beckett, Proust, in Proust; 3 Dialogues: Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit (London: John Calder, 1965), p. 70.
From H.J. Blackham, Six Existentialist Thinkers (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 95.
Madelon Sprengnether, The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 232.
Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 65.
Julia Kristeva, ‘Within the Microcosm of “The Talking Cure”’, trans. Thomas Gora and Margaret Waller, in Joseph Smith and William Kerrigan ed, Interpreting Lacan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 34.
Julia Kristeva, ‘The Speaking Subject’, in Marshall Blonsky ed., On Signs: A Semiotics Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), p. 214.
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© 1996 Anna Smith
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Smith, A. (1996). ‘Strangers to Ourselves’. In: Julia Kristeva. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372078_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372078_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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