| This dissertation engages with Julia Kristeva less as a feminist writer than as a cultural analyst, social constructivist, and philosopher of modernity. Until the late eighties, the reception of Kristeva's work in the United States, Germany, and Sweden was largely determined by the socio-historical developments (i.e., the feminist movements and political upheavals) that emerged in most Western countries in the late sixties and seventies, and by the academic feminism that emerged in the wake of those events and theorized those events. In this context, Kristeva was regarded as an exponent of "French feminism" and of ecriture feminine even as her theory of the Semiotic was often considered essentialist, especially from the perspective of American activism (chapter one).; Instead of elaborating yet another critique of her texts and of their feminist critique, my goal is to relocate Kristeva's theories in their context of origin (chapter two), and to draw parallels between her notions of the text and of the author and those of two contemporary authors--the German Sarah Kirsch and the Swede Ulla Isaksson--(chapters three and four). These examples reveal that, for these two authors as well, writing as a female Speaking Subject neither presupposes a predetermined attitude toward language and femaleness, nor an acceptance of dominant ideologies.; The cultural concerns of the nineties have evolved away from the predominantly feminist revisionist critique of Western society that had erected gender as a category, toward a post-colonial, post-humanist, and post-feminist critique. As a study in socio-cultural history, this project shows how those three women writers address identity as a multi-channeled construction that can be renegociated in any new situation. Kristeva's work theorizes what Kirsch and Isaksson effectively do. Always placing the embodied human subject at the core of their argument, each of these authors empowers individuals, letting them take charge of the episteme to construct a personal politics through semiotic moments, i.e., moments of challenge to the dominant discourse. As a cross-cultural comparison, this project also highlights the shared European marxist heritage that links Kristeva, Kirsch, and Isaksson. |
