| During my stay at NIAS, I would like to finish a full-length monograph on Julia Kristeva (born in Bulgaria, 1941). Although it is not my intention to write a biography, I will use the chronology of her life to sketch the broader intellectual contexts within which her works were written. By setting off her critical essays against her novels, I will demonstrate how they inform each other and how, in Kristeva's thinking, the personal and the theoretical are closely knit together. Along the same line, I will study the concept of motherhood as it appears in her work, in relation to the image of the Virgin Mary within the Orthodox belief of her childhood. The concept of multiple affiliations (being both outside and inside intellectual life in France) will also inform my analysis of her position within the various intellectual formations she belonged to during successive stages of her life. |
