Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death

or Language Haunted by Sex

Julia Kristeva, Armine Kotin Mortimer

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English

Columbia University Press
18 January 2024

Literature, Poetry & Criticism; Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 ; Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers

Series: European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism

Julia Kristeva has been both attracted and repelled by Dostoyevsky since her youth. In this extraordinary book, by turns poetic and intensely personal, she brings her unique critical sensibility to bear on the tormented and visionary Russian author.

Kristeva ranges widely across Dostoyevsky's novels and his journalism, plunging deep into the great works-and many of the smaller ones-to investigate her fascination with the Russian author. What emerges is a luminous vision of the writer's achievements, seen in a wholly new way through Kristeva's distinctive perspective on language. With her keen psychoanalytical eye, she offers brilliant insights into the passionate heroines of the great novels. Focusing on Dostoyevsky's polyphonic writing, Kristeva also demonstrates the importance of Orthodox Christianity throughout his body of work, analyzing the complex ways his carnivalesque theology informs his fiction and commentary.

An original and profound interpretation of one of the nineteenth century's greatest writers, this book's insights are also relevant to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries-up to our unsettled present, to which Kristeva's humane reading of the suffering Russian author brings understanding and even solace.

By: Julia Kristeva
Translated by: Armine Kotin Mortimer
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm,
ISBN: 9780231210515
ISBN 10: 0231210515
Series: European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism
Pages: 344
Publication Date: 18 January 2024
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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.” Armine Kotin Mortimer is professor emerita of French literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the translator of Julia Kristeva’s novel The Enchanted Clock (Columbia, 2018) and the recipient of an NEA Translation Fellowship.

Reviews for Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death: or Language Haunted by Sex

The full force of Julia Kristeva’s lifetime of (psycho)analyzing revolutionary writers and speaking beings come together in this masterful analysis of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s life and work. Dostoyevsky’s polyphonic novels, as Kristeva brilliantly shows, exemplify the human capacity for sublimation. Decades before Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and its primary processes, Dostoyevsky was very deliberately wielding the sting of the negative, turning demons into words, new meanings, and art. -- Noëlle McAfee, author of <i>Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis</i> Poetic, stunning, fascinating, and deeply insightful, Kristeva’s readings of Dostoyevsky are as much about us and our time as they are about him and his works. This book is a celebration of literature and language as an antidote to the extremes of nihilism and fundamentalism that still threaten us today. -- Kelly Oliver, philosopher, novelist, and professor emerita, Vanderbilt University