Julia Kristeva and the language of love in Slovenian children's literature

In her book Tales of Love (1987), Julia Kristeva analyses the concept of love. She labels her text as «a philosophy of love» and defines love as infinite quests for rebirth through the experience of love. According to Kriste-va, love is explicitly a hymn to the narcissistic power to which «I» may sacrifice itself. Her rhetorical question is whether we all speak of the same thing when we speak about love. Kristeva states that in the rapture of loving the limits of one's own identity vanish; at the same time, the lines between reference and meaning begin to blur in love's discourse. Love is the intense sign of truth and eternity. The subject discovers the confines of its condition and the powerlessness of language. Kristeva concludes that love is the time and space in which «I» assumes the right to be extraordinary. The characteristics of love are: 1) Expectancy: the subject becomes painfully sensitive to its incompleteness that it was not aware of before. 2) The call: the body responds to the symptoms or emotions. 3) The meeting: the mixture of pleasure, hope and promise represents a perfect future. The experience of love is: 1) Symbolic (forbidden, distinguishable, thinkable); 2) Imaginary (what the Self imagines in order to sustain and expand itself); 3) Real (an impossible domain, where affects desire everything and no one accounts for the fact that the self is only a part of the whole). In this article, Julia Kristeva's theoretical framework of love will be applied to the following three Slovenian authors of children's books that are in the curriculum at Slovene primary schools and the fact they wrote about love and they use language (metaphors) of love according to Kristeva: F. Preseren: This study aims to explore comprehensively and in depth the notion of love in A Wreath of Sonnets and in concrete textual contexts. The study is based on elements expressed rationally as well as on elements based on an analysis of the context (expectation, call, encounter).