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Professor Belsey's main area of work is on the implications of poststructuralist theory for aspects of cultural history and criticism. Her books include Critical Practice (1980), Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (1994) and Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture (1999). 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.

Structuralism is a theoretical paradigm in sociology, anthropology, linguistics and semiotics positing that elements of human culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure. It works to uncover the structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel.

Post-structuralism is grounded in the concept of overdetermination, even when the concept does not appear explicitly in textual presentations.

Overdetermination as an epistemology implies the absence of a break between discourse and the objects of discourse. It implies that theory is not separate from reality nor is reality separate from theory. We SEE what we are TAUGHT to see in the concepts we LEARN. The concepts we LEARN are complexly shaped by the stream of reality of which we are elements.

Post-structuralism recognizes the power of discourse to shape reality (both perceptions of reality and the concrete reality that is perceived). Discourse (theory) can produce SIGHT of FICTIVE objects, such as race (as in white race), or deny SIGHT of REAL social relationships/objects, such as class (as in feudal class relationships). In other words, at any given moment and theoretical understanding, we experience only limited aspects of the world and some of what we experience is based on falsehoods embedded in some of the discourses we have learned (falsehoods in the sense of not existing separately from the theoretical constructs, not even satisfying the coherence of defined objects within that discourse, as subject to investigation on the basis of the internal rules of coherence and fact of the discourse (e.g. the genetic notion of race fails upon inspection of the correlation between those physical features ascribed to races and the genetic make-up of those so grouped)

Click icon to add pictureCOMMON S

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COMMON SENSE

what is Literature ??

the general answer is that literature reflect society , it tells truth about the period in which it was produce , about world about nature of human being about its belief.

Literary text are written in personal experiences by the author and taught in the same way

Keeping in view the background of author

This is called common sense

Definition: Expressive Realism is a fusion of the Aristotelian concept of art as mimesis with the Romantic concept of art as expressing the perceptions and emotions of a person "possessed of more than unusual organic sensibility."

Characteristics:

Expressive realism values richness, honesty, and immediacy and rejects schematism, implausability and ideology.

Literature is a reflection of life.

Literature is authentic when it describes the world of social relationships or conveys the inner experience (often seen as "universal") of the individual quest for identity.

In Critical Practice, Belsey reveals a problem in the “obvious mode of reading” (2). Common sense, Belsey contends, reflects a narrow view of how readers approach text. Critical theory appears to offer no clear alternative at first glance, and a close reading of post-Saussurean writers only illuminates the obscure impossibility of elucidating a theory based on language as the pervasive and inescapable modus operandi. A rejection of empiricism does, however, give life to an indirect, yet empowering method for the interpretation of text. In order to do so, Belsey surveys the theoretical landscape of common sense, namely, the ideological implications and various attacks on the orthodoxy of expressive realism. Post-Saussurean linguistics interrogate the foundations of expressive realism, a theory that projects the “reality of experience” of one exceptional provider of knowledge and further expresses that reality through discourse (7).

A close look at expressive realism, new criticism, and the work of Northrop Frye lends to a seemingly thorough excavation of common sense as a reasonable approach to literary criticism, yet Belsey notes that these theoretical approaches fail to undermine common sense and expressive realism. Post-Saussurean linguistics, however, questions the logic of the empiricist-idealist framework. In reading a passage of realism, one identifies the similarity in patterns, values, and social relationships between the fictional world crafted and those we experience. Belsey does not fail to mention, however, the post-Saussurean suggestion of ‘classic realism’ to identify the direct illusion of reality as manifest through even the most fantastical forms (51-2). More importantly, Belsey emphasizes the singularity of meaning amplified by the major theoretical attempts to trump expressive realism as a viable approach. Instead, a plurality of meaning becomes necessary to expose a more radical approach to criticism.

Providing a thorough review of Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Belsey recognizes the notion that breaking from ideology is not possible, but engaging in discourse that defies and contests the ideology in question is a viable pursuit; she points to the ideology of the irrational woman to unveil the plurality of means in which crises in the social formation may be precipitated . In working with the perceived eye and the perceiving eye, Belsey continues the conversation with an exposition on classic realism. Reading and understanding text to generate a greater understanding of historical specificity, Belsey contends, is not synonymous with reading that text after it has been liberated from its “historical moorings” . Text, ideology, and reader work in a reciprocal process to generate meanings and to potentially inspire new meanings. Whether the study of literature remains a useful endeavor is finally interrogated at the end of the work, yet Belsey argues that literary criticism is imperative to generate a refined understanding of a world with no transcendent, signified meaning .

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New Criticism emphasizes explication, or "close reading," of "the work itself." It rejects old historicism's attention to biographical and sociological matters. Instead, the objective determination as to "how a piece works" can be found through close focus and analysis, rather than through extraneous and erudite special knowledge. It has long been the pervasive and standard approach to literature in college and high school curricula.

New Criticism, incorporating Formalism, examines the relationships between a text's ideas and its form, between what a text says and the way it says it. New Critics "may find tension, irony, or paradox in this relation, but they usually resolve it into unity and coherence of meaning" (Biddle 100). New Criticism attempts to be a science of literature, with a technical vocabulary, some of which we all had to learn in junior high school English classes (third-person, denoument, etc.). Working with patterns of sound, imagery, narrative structure, point of view, and other techniques discernible on close reading of the text, they seek to determine the function and appropriateness of these to the self-contained work.

New Critics, especially American ones in the 1940s and 1950s, attacked the standard notion of "expressive realism," the romantic fallacy that literature is the efflux of a noble soul, that for example love pours out onto the page in 14 iambic pentameter lines rhyming ABABCD etc. The goal then is not the pursuit of sincerity or authenticity, but subtlety, unity, and integrity--and these are properties of the text, not the author. The work is not the author's; it was detached at birth. The author's intentions are "neither available nor desirable" (nor even to be taken at face value when supposedly found in direct statements by authors). Meaning exists on the page. Thus, New Critics insist that the meaning of a text is intrinsic and should not be confused with the author's intentions nor the work's affective dimension (its impressionistic effects on the reader). The "intentional fallacy" is when one confuses the meaning of a work with the author's purported intention (expressed in letters, diaries, interviews, for example). The "affective fallacy" is the erroneous practice of interpreting texts according to the psychological or emotional responses of readers, confusing the text with its results.