Abstract
This chapter shows how Kristeva’s theories on motherhood in the essay “Stabat Mater” as well as her writing on abjection in Powers of Horror have stimulated new directions in American literary studies. Hortense Spillers’s Black, White, and in Color and Jack Halberstam’s Skin Shows, for example, draw on a psychoanalytic approach shaped by her theories to address especially the race question. I discuss primarily Kristeva’s essays from the 1980s in dialogue with two American critics who bring their creative versions of Neo-Freudian thought to bear on Paule Marshall’s and Bram Stoker’s novels.
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Bové, C.M. (2020). Kristeva’s Theories on Motherhood and Abjection: Spillers and Halberstam. In: Kristeva in America. Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59912-6_1
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