ABSTRACT
Julia Kristeva grew up in the heart of what Catherine Bouthors-Paillart calls the ‘immense crossroads of the Balkans’. Enrolled in a French, Dominican-run kindergarten and subsequently at the Alliance Francaise, Kristeva’s education was, from the outset, ‘francophile and francophone’. In Paris, Kristeva rapidly became acquainted with many of the period’s cultural luminaries. If Barthes made an impression on Kristeva, Kristeva seems to have made an equally positive impression on Barthes. In March 1966, Kristeva solicited an appointment with him to discuss the nouveau roman. The suggestibility and adaptability Kristeva evinced in revising her initial view of Formalistic structuralism under Barthes’ influence is echoed in other changes of position. Kristeva’s interest in Saussure’s anagrammatic theory and her investment in the development of a formal semiology are conjugated in ‘Towards a Semiology of Paragrams’, a piece published in Tel Quel in the spring of 1967.
