Name: Colette (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)
Price: 1394.00 TWD
Availability: InStock
Author: Julia Kristeva
ISBN: 9780231128971

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Colette (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)

Type

Physical Book

Author

Julia Kristeva

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Year

2005

Language

English

Pages

448

Format

Paperback

Weight

1.55

ISBN13

9780231128971

Synopsis "Colette (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism) "

Published on the fiftieth anniversary of her death, this intellectual biography of Colette-the final volume of Julia Kristeva's trilogy "Female Genius"-will be considered a major breakthrough in understanding one of the great creative minds of the twentieth century. Colette (1873-1954) was a prolific novelist who celebrated sexual pleasure and invented a language for it at a time when women writers were inhibited about dealing with the topic. Female sexuality in a male-dominated world and the joys and pains of love served as her main themes, and her novels-Cheri, La Chatte, and Gigi, among them-blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction long before autobiographical novels became commonplace. She married three times, had male and female lovers, and for a time supported herself as a mime, dancing semi-nude in music halls throughout France. When she died, she received the first state funeral the French Republic had ever given a woman. Colette's writing was inspired by entertainers, courtesans, an aristocratic Parisian lesbian subculture, and fin de siecle gay aesthetes. She admired those who lived on the sexual edge and was accused of moral corruption in intellectual matters-she published in pro-Vichy, anti-Semitic journals during the Occupation, even as she fought to keep her Jewish third husband from deportation. Kristeva deftly examines Colette's controversial life and work and considers two of her most important influences, Honore de Balzac and Marcel Proust. In a multifaceted approach, Kristeva considers Colette's use of metaphor, the characters in her novels, and the development of her writing within the context of her life. Paying particular attention to the language the French writer used to "say the unsayable and name the unnameable," Kristeva offers an elegant and sophisticated critique of Colette's psychological conflicts, particularly her sexual relationships and how these conflicts are both recorded in and resolved through the act of writing. Appealing to Freudian and Lacanian concepts such as the Oedipus complex, perversion, the symbolic, and melancholy, Kristeva opens Colette's oeuvre to psychoanalytic interpretation. The impression that remains is of a woman intent on experiencing the world's pleasures-its jouissance-in a melding with the world's flesh.

Julia Kristeva

(Author)

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She is a writer, psychoanalyst, member of the University Institute of France, and a professor at the University Diderot-Paris VII, where she heads the Doctoral School "Language, Literature, Image" and the Roland Barthes Center. She holds doctorates from numerous universities and is a member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society. She is part of the Economic and Social Council of France and chairs the National Council "Disability: Awareness, Information, Training". In 2004, she received the Holberg Prize (Norway); and in 2006, the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought (Bremen). She has written about thirty books, novels, and essays, including Strangers to Ourselves (1988), The Samurai (1992), The Female Genius: Hannah Arendt, Vol. I (1999), Melanie Klein, Vol. II (2003), Colette: A Female Genius (2007).

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