What is poststructuralist theory, and what difference does it make to literary criticism? Where do we find the meaning of the text: in the author's head? in the reader's? Or do we, instead, make meaning in the practice of reading itself? If so, what part do our own values play in the process of interpretation? And what is the role of the text? Catherine Belsey considers these and other questions concerning the relations between human beings and language, readers and texts, writing and cultural politics. Assuming no prior knowledge of poststructuralism, Critical Practice guides the reader confidently through the maze of contemporary theory. It simply and lucidly explains the views of key figures such as Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, and shows their theories at work in readings of familiar literary texts. Critical Practice argues that theory matters, because it makes a difference to what we do when we read, opening up new possibilities for literary and cultural analysis. Poststructuralism, in conjunction with psychoanalysis and deconstruction, makes radical change to the way we read both a priority and a possibility. With a new chapter, updated guidance on further reading and revisions throughout, this second edition of Critical Practice is the ideal guide to the present and future of literary studies.
Catherine Belsey is currently Research Professor at Swansea University and formerly Distinguished Research Professor at Cardiff University. Best known for her pioneering book, Critical Practice (Methuen, 1980), Catherine Belsey has an international reputation as a deft and sophisticated critical theorist and subtle and eloquent critic of literature, particularly of Renaissance texts. Her main area of work is on the implications of poststructuralist theory for aspects of cultural history and criticism. Her present project is ’Culture and the Real’, a consideration of the limitations of contemporary constructivism in the light of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Professor Belsey chairs the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, a research forum for discussion and debate on current views of the relation between human beings and culture.
Concise and lucid introduction to structuralism/poststructuralism, and its applications in literary criticism. Belsey herself acknowledges the difficulty of introducing the reader to the arcane terminology of structuralism, but she does a good job. However, I have some theoretical disagreements. This is a horribly long review, because I'm using it to order my thoughts on the book just as much as assess it's quality.
Belsey explains at the beginning that her main dispute is with 'expressive realism', a critical theory (usually only implicitly stated) which treats the literary text as a receptacle for the subjectivity of the author. The author, with their superior sensibility, absorbs truth and beauty from the world like a sponge, and uses the book to communicate these truths to the reader-subject. You see this in Shelley and Coleridge's theoretical statements, of course, but to this day it's also the way literature is popularly understood (witness, for instance, social media accounts quibbling over whether George R. R. Martin is trying to communicate cynicism or moralism in the Game of Thrones series). Belsey reviews and discards the attempts of New Criticism, Northop Frye, and Reader-Power to demolish expressive realism. The former case is especially interesting. The New Critics advocated totally ignoring the author - they said that the text's meaning is located solely within the text. Belsey demonstrates that the New Critics struggled to account for the source of this meaning. Yes, there was the text, but what constituted the text? Language, and the New Critics had no theory of language. Language is a social and historical phenomenon and can only be located outside of the text. Because of their hermetically sealed poems, the New Critics often ended up reproducing expressive realism - what's the source of the text's integrity, subtlety, unity, etc.? How well it expresses timeless truths about nature and reality. Who originally apprehended those timeless truths? Well... the author.
An adequate critical practice thus requires a theory of language. Belsey favours Sassurean/post-Sassurean structuralist linguistics. The argument runs that the world is a continuum with no discrete objects, until language comes along. Consider colour: English has green, blue, grey, and brown. Welsh has gwyrdd, glas, and llwyd. Glas is mostly blue, but things that are green and grey can also be labelled glas before they slip into the category of gwyrdd and llwyd. Or weather: a the inhabitants of a planet where snow only happened three times a year would likely only have one word for snow, whereas the inhabitants of an eternally wintery planet would have many words which make fine-grained distinctions between types of snow. We assume that each word we speak - the sign - corresponds to a real thing, the signified. But if there were a simple sign-signifier relationship, then every word in every language would correspond to the same thing. But this is not the case. Language, then, has no referent to an object outside itself, has no positive content, but is instead a system of signs which refer to the differences between each other. Expressive realism is dispatched thusly: 'If, by the world, we understand the world we experience, the world differentiated by language, then the claim that realism reflects the world means that realism reflects the world constructed in language. This is a tautology.'
Thus begins one of my first problems with Belsey's structuralism. Language does not seem to me to be without positive content. It is different across different biomes, economies, temporalities, whatever; and within a language signifiers and the differences between them are surely very important in understanding any human endeavour. Language certainly constructs our understanding of the world. But ultimately it still refers to something outside of language. It's true that we can't use language to directly access phenomena separate from it, but those phenomena still exist. Snow is not a linguistic object. Nor is experience totally mediated by language. We don't deny that animals can have experiences of the world, and most of them don't have language. The sectors of human experience unconstructed by language can't be disentangled from those that are, but it's not impossible for them to exist.
The theoretical approach that I have taken away from this for myself is, then, an expressive realism modified by the insights of structuralism on language. It's much more humble about claims to truth possessed by the original theory, but it still argues that text (and language in general) does refer to something outside itself. Sometimes the common-sensical is correct-ical
Continuing Belsey's argument: what is inscribed in language? Ideology. Ideological discourses are inscribed in language, and have the purpose of reproducing the existing social formation (our current one being the fossil-genocide-capitalist world-system). Ideology smooths over and obfuscates tensions and contradictions in the linguistic order, and has the key role of constructing people as subjects. This is an important reversal. No longer do subjects use language to communicate their beliefs about the world: rather, language constructs subjects according to the ideological discourses it is composed of. Belsey's example: ideological sexism was inscribed in language which treated maleness as the default symbol of universal humanity. Mankind was all humans, the default pronoun was 'he', etc. This had the effect of constructing subjugated female subjects, and male subjects who viewed themselves as superior humanity, women as a lesser appendage. A feminist/gender-neutral ideological discourse was created to struggle with this aspect of the social formation: people or humanity rather than mankind, introduction of 'he or she' or 'they' as default pronouns, etc.
Belsey's criticism of the centrality of the subject takes her to an interesting criticism of the classic realist novel, which she believes has the effect of maintaining the existing social formation. The classic realist novel, through illusionism, narrative closure (everything gets tied up with a neat little bow), and the hierarchy of discourse (that hierarchy being between the true authorial discourse and dialogue distinguished by speech marks) participates in the creation of the modern economic subject. The classic realist novel 'addresses itself to [the reader] directly, offering the reader as the position from which the text is most "obviously" intelligible, the position of the subject in (and of) ideology.' Crudely put, the set of discourses embedded in the classic realist novel participate in the creation of capitalism's good little worker bee.
What is the alternative style of writing and reading? Belsey brings Lacan into the picture, whose ideas as she describes them seem unfalsifiable and wacky, albeit intriguing. Lacan believes that to enter society, one must speak, to become a subject, one must speak. Language is the prerequisite of being. But by speaking of an 'I', one cuts oneself in half. Forevermore, there is the 'I' that speaks, and the 'I' that is inadequately represented by that speech, the repository of unconscious desires. It is the contradiction between these two brain-halves that Lacan and Belsey see as a source of possible change in society. Classical realism eases this tension, but what Belsey calls the interrogative text exacerbates it.
What's the interrogative text? Well, linguistics distinguishes between three kinds of statements: declarative (tells you information), imperative (tells you what to do), and interrogative (asks you a question). Belsey maps varieties of literature onto these. Classic realism declares, propaganda commands. The interrogative text, through a clash of discourses contained within itself and a refusal to endorse any one with finality, asks questions of the reader. The interrogative text unleashes the plurality of meanings which expressive realism tries to restrict to the authority of the author. Of course, it's also possible to read classic realism interrogatively, but this takes a bit of extra work, involving attention to what goes unsaid in the novel. I think Iris Murdoch's The Bell is a great example of an interrogative text - there are multiple visions of the good life, but no one of them comes out unscathed by the end of the novel.
Belsey does not analyse Pride and Prejudice, but I think that Belsey's theory of classic realism would be excellent for the analysis of it. There's an illusion of reality, there's a hierarchy of discourse, and there's narrative closure. The reader is invited to stand as reader-subject over the characters, and enjoy Austen's message of moderation. Lizzy, kind but not naive like Jane, intelligent but not bookish like Mary, merry but not carefree like Lydia, successfully navigates the social travails laid out before her, moving through the commercial society adroitly but maintaining her integrity. Her reward is marriage to the tamed Mr. Darcy, and they ride off into the mythical land of Derbyshire with great satisfaction. By emulating such behaviour, one would be well suited to survive capitalism! I try and be a bit like Eliza Bennett myself, although unfortunately I get pulled in the directions of Jane, Mary, and Lydia rather than sticking to the sensible centre. Belsey's strategy also would be useful for unmasking Pride and Prejudice. What goes unsaid, what lurks in the text's unconscious (Belsey is very firm that it's not the author's unconscious we're peering into here)? Most obviously, there's what might happen after the end of the book. Love, like the subject, is a process. Lizzy and Darcy's issues would not be fully solved by marriage, but Austen was never really interested in peering beyond the white veil. There's also Lydia. Seduced by Wickham, she is morally ruined. Georgiana, Darcy's sister, was similarly seduced by Wickham; but rescued by Darcy, she survived with her virtue intact, and is presented as a thoroughly gentle girl by the text. Would anybody have looked on her kindly if her elopement had succeeded? Well, she simply would not have been written as such a nice girl if this had been the case. This tells us a lot about the day's prevailing ideologies of femininity, virtue, etc.
Belsey's technique is sophisticated and fascinating, but I have issues with it. Belsey is correct that the subject is a process, crafted out of discourses during the historical progress of their life, and it seems right to me that the classic realist novel participates in that ideological process; in the sense that they create modern readers. However, Belsey wants to deny the autonomy of subjects in the reading and writing process. The reader assimilates the discourses of the text and their response is conditioned by the discourses constituting them (we must bear in mind that Lacan's unconscious, unlike Freud's biological one, is entirely composed of linguistic symbols). The writer, also a pile of discourses, splices together and rearranges existing ones and then spits them out as a novel. But how can we account for the different responses to texts, the very plurality of meanings Belsey so strongly advocates? Why isn't everyone basically the same? I think we have to give subjects a bit of leeway in how they respond to and assemble discourse, and I think that we have to have some recourse to the biographical factors that Belsey claims are scientifically unhelpful. The subject is a process of maybe 95% linguistic sediment and assimilation + history, and 5% freedom.
Final issue with the book: the plurality of meanings thing is very relativist, and leaves us with no ability to assess the literary quality of a text, which is really what everybody expects out of literary criticism. There's a reason Belsey wrote lots of books about Shakespeare, and none about car adverts, even though both are texts. Pride and Prejudice is a fantastic book in spite of (and even because of) its conservative morality. Perhaps Belsey approaches this question in her book 'Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art', but she dismisses attempts to assess how good a book is here, and advocates the expansion of literary criticism's domain to texts in general rather than just literature. Still, this final criticism of mine could just be a result of my narrow-mindedness.
P.S. maybe Belsey is unfair to classic realism. Austen can be read as quietist, but realists like Ibsen and Flaubert had explosive effects on society. Maybe they don't count as 'classic realism' but instead as just realists, however?
rahimhashemiکتاب عمل نقد از خانم کاترین بلزی و ترجمه عباس مخبر را خواندم. چند خط درباره کتاب: استاد و دانشجو در این فرض مشترکند ک در نوعی برداشت مبتنی بر شعور متعارف از ادبیات اشتراک نظر دارند ک عمل خواندن را نوعی جستجو برای رسیدن به واقعگرایی تاثری میشمارند. از نظریههای جدید سخن گفته، نقد جدید را میخواند، از قدرت خواننده میگوید. درباره نقد و ارتباطش با معنا در یک فصل صحبت میکند و از زبان شناسی پساسوسوری، ساخت معنا و تکثر معنا مینویسد، سوژه و مدلولهای متفاوت آنرا تبیین میکند، از «تفاوط» میگوید، و خواننده را بعنوان مصرف کننده یا خالق اثر و تولید کننده متن بررسی میکند. ترجمه کتاب و ویراستاری خوب اما محتوا و موضوع آن ک درباره فلسفه نقد است سنگین و سخت فهم است. میتوانم بگویم که یکی از کتابهایی است ک بیشترین زمان را از من گرفت و تقریبا هیچ نفهمیدم...
Quite a good introduction/summary of critical theory, its main philosophers and how it applies to literary studies. It is still a demanding read but Belsey made a good attempt in explaning what Derrida and Barthes really meant. And while I was reading it, I even thought for a moment, I finally understood it! Of course, later on, I realized it is not really possible to understand them fully as it is an extremely dense material but it clarifies certain points.
If someone is interested in critical theory and literary studies, it helps! It is not the best book I have read on the matter but it is a decent explanation.
Amazing read: it doodled my brain. But i can't say anything now without thinking it's motivated by a hidden ideological structure. And if ideology really is inscribed in discourse, it could be happening right now, argh!
going through my post-quarter goodreads update and a lot of books are getting two stars. maybe this is an indicator for how final grades are going to start looking for me
Goes from Saussurean to post-Saussurean criticism highlighting along the way the roles of Althusser, Lacan, Barthes, and Derrida, reader-response, ideal expressionism, among others.