ROUTLEDGE NEW ACCENTS SERIES :CULTURE AND THE REAL

New Accents

by BELSEY

What makes us the people we are? Culture evidently plays a part, but how large a part? Is culture alone the source of our identities? Some have argued that human nature is the foundation of culture, others that culture is the foundation of human identity. Catherine Belsey calls for a more nuanced, relational account of what it is to be human, and in doing so puts forward a significant new theory of culture.Culture and the Real explains with Professor Belsey's characteristic lucidity the views of recent theorists, including Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard, Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek, as well as their debt to the earlier work of Kant and Hegel, in order to take issue with their accounts of what it is to be human. To explore the human, she demonstrates, is to acknowledge the relationship between culture and what we don't not the familiar world picture presented to us by culture as 'reality', but the unsayable, or the strange region that lies beyond culture, which Lacan has called 'the real'. Culture, she argues, registers a sense of its own limits in ways more subtle than the theorists allow.This volume builds on the insights of Belsey's influential Critical Practice to provide not only an accessible introduction to contemporary theories of what it is to be human, but a major new contribution to current debates about culture. Taking examples from film and art, fiction and poetry, Culture and the Real is essential reading for those studying or working in cultural criticism, within the fields of English, Cultural Studies, Film Studies and Art History.

177 pages, Paperback

First published December 30, 2004

Reviews

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

i'm growing quite weary of theory...but i must admit i'm enjoying this book very much...
once again, at the risk of becoming tautological, the ideas in these types of books strike me as largely inaccessible and ultimately devoid of practical academic use...
i won't say never, but it is unlikely in the extreme that i will ever include the majority of this stuff in my academic life...the majors yes, i.e. lacan, freud, niestzche, and even zizek, but the rest will likely fall away...
it's possible i'm not being entirely fair, if i were to teach this course, and i'd love to by the way, my list would be very different, but would it be more accessible?...
i'd like to think so...
an off the top of the head list...

anxiety of influence - harold bloom
freud - intro lectures on psycho-analysis and new intro lectures
jung - portable jung, man and his symbols
barthes - image/music/text
baudrillard - simulacra and simulation
mcluhan - understanding media
mccloud - understanding comics
critical theory - charles bressler (or at least one good general survey, maybe even -yikes!- the blackwell guide!!)

i could go on i guess...it just seems to me these books are more relevant, and more importantly, readable...

perhaps i'm just overwhelmed at this point...to say i'll never read foucault or horkhiemer and adorno again is admittedly unrealistic...i guess i still have to learn to like them...
i still maintain that the point of all of this should be ideas not erudition...
carve that on the door above every office i'll ever work in...please...

in the end, it's an interesting book...it really brings to the fore this odd struggle in the world of theory over jacques lacan...he's this, he's that, he meant this, he meant that...the distinctions that are being argued it seems to me are approaching the angels dancing on heads of pins...
but what do i know...