Book excerpt: This Pivot studies the influence of Julia Kristeva’s work on American literary and film studies. Chapters consider this influence via such innovative approaches as Hortense Spillers’s and Jack Halberstam’s to Paule Marshall’s fiction and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, respectively. The book also considers how critics in the United States receive Kristeva’s work on French feminism, semiotics, and psychoanalytic writing in complex, controversial ways, especially on the question of marginalized populations. Examples include Kelly Oliver and Benigno Trigo on Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil as well as Frances Restuccia on David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Carol Mastrangelo Bové also examines Kristeva’s take on the US in her essays and fiction, which provide a vital part of the dialogue with American critics. Like them, Bové incorporates Kristeva’s thought in her own creative readings of little-known authors and directors including Christiane Rochefort, Nancy Savoca, and Frank Lentricchia.