JULIA KRISTEVA’S NARRATIVE THEORY

Abstract

The French scholar of Bulgarian origin Julia Kristeva was a literary critic in the speciality, but thanks to her research in the field of textual studies, she left her mark on almost every humanitarian discipline. Discussions around Yulia Kristeva’s creative and scientific work have been going on for more than half a century, starting with the publication of the author’s first literary studies, but a comprehensive scientific analysis of Kristeva’s studies in narratology has not yet been carried out. This article focuses on Yulia Kristeva’s contribution to the development of narrative theory, which she began to work on in the mid-1960s. The formation of the methodological tools of the young researcher was greatly influenced by the works of twentieth-century European thinkers – S. Freud, E. Levinas, J.-P. Sartre, J. Lacan and many others. Yulia Kristeva’s path to the big science was opened by her translations of the works of the Soviet literary critic and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, whose teachings were the basis for the main conclusions of a new direction of interdisciplinary studies, one of the founders of which was the Bulgarian scholar – narratology. The publication draws attention to the relationship between Bakhtin’s theses on the communication of cultures and Yulia Kristeva’s views on the dialogue of texts, which is already evident at the stage of their creation. The author also tries to question the myth of Julia Kristeva’s belonging to the poststructuralists, since the Bulgarian literary critic was only interested in similar topics, but her views on the subject, the relationship between the Self and the Other and other fundamental categories and concepts of philosophy were fundamentally different from the poststructuralists. The author concludes that Yulia Kristeva’s narratology is closely connected with the philosophy of dialogue in its Soviet interpretation, which was expressed by Mikhail Bakhtin. Kristeva became not only a follower of Bakhtin, but also his main translator and populariser.