A Worm in the Apple: French Critical Theory and the Metaphor of the Child in the Work of Atwood and Broner

Julia Kristeva's statement represents perhaps the most challenging aspect of recent French critical theory-the linking of discourse, with its feet in the camps of both communicative and literary language, to the key elements of a gendered culture, reproduction and production. In Kristeva's view, literature has cultural rather than simply Cultural implications, and the task of literary criticism becomes a political rather than simply an aesthetic act. Literary critics also become cultural critics as Kristeva and other French theorists of discourse