Literature can have a disturbing effect on its readers. It unsettles our hold on everyday experience and makes us strangers and exiles. Anna Smith argues that this is the side of literature which attracts critic and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. Kristeva is drawn to states of extremity where language and the psyche are under duress, and in this book Smith examines the way the alchemical properties of words may transform these extremities into what Kristeva calls 'a fire of tongues, an exit from representation'.
- ISBN13 9780333629222
- Publish Date 15 November 1996 (first published 1 January 1996)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Palgrave Macmillan
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 246
- Language English