A special issue of Textual Practice, dedicated to the work of Catherine Belsey
Literature and Culture: The Work of Catherine Belsey
Edited by Neil Badmington and Jürgen Pieters
About the Issue
For more than a quarter of a century, the work of Catherine Belsey has shaped and reshaped how we read literature and culture. This special issue of
Textual Practice – the first of its kind – addresses the difference that Belsey’s work has made.
The collection is not a
Festschrift; it is, rather, a series of theoretical, literary, and cultural investigations that take different aspects of Belsey’s work as a starting point. The engagement, moreover, is critical: if the volume works in the wake of Belsey’s writings, it regularly does so with a view to pushing her findings in new directions. Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s contribution, for instance, discusses Belsey and Žižek on Lacan’s concept of the real, establishes their differences, and then proceeds, drawing upon Marx, to move ‘beyond Belsey’. Alan Sinfield, meanwhile, looks back to
Critical Practice, Belsey’s first book, and reconsiders the place of Pierre Macherey in Belsey’s radical challenge to traditional accounts of reading. In doing so, and in comparing the first and second editions of
Critical Practice, Sinfield draws attention to the turn to ‘undecidability’ in Belsey’s work and questions its place in the practical realm of politics. For Sinfield, undecidability is not wholly satisfactory, and, like Lecercle, he calls for a move beyond the account offered in Belsey’s work.
Other contributions to the volume draw upon Belsey’s writings to discuss, among other things: Shakespeare and death; fairy tales and Roland Barthes; visual culture; psychoanalysis; non-human cultures and the limits of cultural analysis; tragedy and subjectivity; and New Historicism.
Contributors
Neil Badmington, Catherine Bernard, John Drakakis, Indira Ghose, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Jürgen Pieters, Kris Pint, Alan Sinfield, and Julia Thomas. The collection closes with an afterword by Catherine Belsey.
Contents
Editors’ Foreword
Neil Badmington; Jürgen Pieters
Danger! Keep out!: exploring culture with Catherine Belsey (and other animals)
Neil Badmington
When the real matters: interpreting the visual with Catherine Belsey
Catherine Bernard
Revisiting
The Subject of Tragedy
John Drakakis
Jesting with Death: Hamlet in the Graveyard
Indira Ghose
An old Bolshevik of theory, or: welcome to the abundance of the Belseyan real
Jean-Jacques Lecercle
‘I was never a new historicist’: Catherine Belsey's ‘history at the level of the signifier’
Jürgen Pieters
Kissing the text: performing the motif of Sleeping Beauty
Kris Pint
Reading
Critical Practice and Macherey
Alan Sinfield
Illustrations by Belsey
Julia Thomas
Afterword
Catherine Belsey
Website: Literature and Culture: The Work of Catherine Belsey, Textual Practice
Also at A Piece of Monologue
