Poststructuralism changes the way we understand the relations between human beings, their culture, and the world. Following a brief account of the historical relationship between structuralism and poststructuralism, this Very Short Introduction traces the key arguments that have led poststructuralists to challenge traditional theories of language and culture. While the author discusses such well-known figures as Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan, she also draws pertinent examples from literature, art, film, and popular culture, unfolding the poststructuralist account of what it means to be a human being. About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam

Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction

Arts & Photography

Belsey, Catherine

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring\nPoststructuralism challenges traditional ways of thinking about human beings and our relation to the world. Language, meaning, and culture are all reappraised, and with them assumptions about what it's possible for us to know. More interested in posing sharply focused questions than in reassuring with certainties, its theorists tend to clarify the options, while leaving them open to debate. At once sceptical towards inherited authority and positive about future possibilities, poststructuralism asks above all that we reflect on its findings.\nIn this Very Short Introduction, Catherine Belsey traces the key arguments that have led poststructuralists to challenge traditional theories of language and culture. In this new edition, such well-known figures as Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida are joined by less famous theorists, and examples are drawn from both high art and popular culture. Shakespeare features alongside advertising and Christmas cards, as well as Lewis Carroll, Marcel Duchamp, Toni Morrison, and the tantalizing lithographs of M. C. Escher.\nABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Literature & Fiction

The second edition of this highly successful anthology makes available to the feminist reader a collection of essays which does justice to the range and diversity, as well as to the eloquence and the challenge of recent feminist critical theory and practice. The new, enlarged Feminist Reader includes Toni Morrison's brilliant discussion of a Hemingway short story, Line Pouchard's reading of Radclyffe Hall's lesbian classic, The Well of Loneliness, Marjorie Garber on Elvis and cross-dressing, and Diane Elam on the relation between feminist and postmodernism, in addition to a selection of influential essays by prominent feminist critics and theorists. The book arose directly from the editors' experience of teaching feminist criticism, and their sense of the need for a fully annotated, representative selection of essays for discussion. They have included a summary of each essay, a glossary of unfamiliar terms, new suggestions for further reading and an updated introduction, mapping the field of feminist critical theory.

The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism

Essays & Correspondence

Red Globe Press

In a harsh, uncaring world the family is valued as a source of warmth and stability. At the same time, we are increasingly compelled to recognize that families can be oppressive both physically and emotionally. Now for the first time in paperback, Catherine Belsey's richly illustrated account of Shakespeare's plays, in conjunction with early modern images of Adam and Eve, locates the construction of family values in cultural history and politics. She shows the pleasures and anxieties generated in the period by the domestication of desire, parental love and cruelty and the relations between siblings - and discusses how Shakespeare's plays explore these themes.

Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture

In a harsh, uncaring world the family is valued as a source of warmth and stability. At the same time, we are increasingly compelled to recognize that families can be oppressive both physically and emotionally. Now in paperback, Catherine Belsey`s illustrated account of Shakespeare`s plays, in conjunction with early modern images of Adam and Eve, locates the construction of family values in cultural history and politics. She shows the pleasures and anxieties generated in the period by the domestication of desire, parental love and cruelty and the relations between siblings and discusses how Shakespeare`s plays explore these themes.

Shakespeare & the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture

Pan/Macmillan

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.

Critical Practice (New Accents)

Routledge

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-François 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 know: 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.

Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism (New Accents)

Culture and the Real (New Accents)

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.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Belsey, Catherine. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Belsey, Catherine

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Belsey, Catherine. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction

Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism

Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture

Shakespeare & the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture

Critical Practice (New Accents)

Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism (New Accents)

Culture and the Real (New Accents)

Critical Practice (New Accents)

Critical Practice (New Accents)