Narrative horsepower in Julia Kristeva’s fiction: Reading movement in meurtre à byzance (2004) and thérèse mon amour (2008)

Julia Kristeva came to fiction writing late in her career, after having established herself as a literary theorist, philosopher and psychoanalyst. Kristeva’s detective novels are all set in Santa-Barbara and feature the characters Northrop Rilsky as the main police detective and Stéphanie Delacour as the investigative journalist. There are numerous transitions at stake in Kristeva’s works: the transition from theory to fiction; the spatial and temporal crossings effected by the characters; the transitional and transnational character of Kristeva’s own life; and the transition between multiple genres in a single text. The chapter focuses on the first impact, namely Sebastian’s trip through the Balkans, in an effort to retrace his Bulgarian roots.