Book
Sēmeiōtikē: Research for a Semanalysis
Sēmeiōtikē: Recherches pour une sémanalyse
Kristeva's first book gathers the essays she wrote in Paris from 1966 onward and sets out 'semanalysis', a critical science of signification that approaches the text as a productive practice rather than as a closed, finished structure. Its essay on Bakhtin, on the word, dialogue and the novel, first printed in Critique in 1967, introduced intertextuality: any text is put together as a mosaic of quotations and is the absorption and transformation of other texts. Selections from the book later appeared in English in Desire in Language (1980).
Main ideas
- Semanalysis: signification is studied as a productive practice, not as a fixed structure.
- Intertextuality: every text is a mosaic of quotations that absorbs and transforms other texts.
- The notion first appeared in the essay on Bakhtin, the word, dialogue and the novel (Critique, 1967).
- As Kelly Oliver describes it, semanalysis joins Freud's psychoanalysis to the semiology of Saussure and Peirce, around the question of why we speak.
What it shows
- 1967
Julia Kristeva introduced Intertextuality
Kristeva coined “intertextualité” in her 1966 essay on Bakhtin, published in Critique in 1967 and reprinted in Sēmeiōtikē (1969), to describe every text as a mosaic of quotations and the transformation of other texts.