Roman u revoluciji pjesničkog jezika

Starting from the marginal position of the novel in the famous book Revolution in Poetic Language (La révolution du langage poétique, 1974) by Julia Kristeva, this paper con-siders a series of questions arising from the author’s attitude to some of the theoretical influ-ences in her early work – primarily Russian Formalism and Bakhtin’s theory of the novel. Considering that since the mid-1960s Kristeva played a crucial role in introducing Russian theorists to French and Western audiences, the attitude towards Russian Formalists and Bakhtin became a commonplace of her reception, obtaining different signs in various readings. In addition to the readings pointing to the crucial influence of Russian Formalism and Futurism on Kristeva’s conception of poetic language, the paper makes a review of the legacy of Bakhtin’s theory of the novel in her early work, with special emphasis on one of her first French texts – Word, Dialogue, and Novel (Le mot, le dialogue et le roman, 1966). Despite the connection between poetic genres and centripetal linguistic forces, which Bakhtin repea-tedly emphasised, Kristeva tried to implement the basic premises of his theory to the con-ception of poetic language. What is the extent of her revolutionary attempt, and what could be the significance of her concept of poetic language in revolutionising the contemporary (inter)disciplinary field of feminist and literary theory are the questions we tried to open by examining the dialogue between two theories that in Kristeva’s oeuvre lasts longer than half a century.