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Presented By : Rincy Elizabeth Sam

ADDRESSING THE SUBJECT -Catherine Belsey

About The Author :

Catherine Belsey is a British Literary Critic Visiting Professor of English at the University of

Derby Fellow of English Association – Fellow of Learned

Society of Wales Her work Critical Practice (1980), an influential

post structuralist text - suggests new directions for literary studies.

Also wrote about the effect of romance novels on modern soiciety

Criticized the traditional ways of criticism Made a scientific analysis of the techniques and

styles of the last century Other major works includes : • Desire : Love Stories in Western Culture (1980)• Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The

Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture (1999)

Addressing the Subject

Taken from Critical Practice Belsey attempts to explain the process by which a

text constructs reader as its subject She works from general to specific Introduces the concept of Lacan’s ‘mirror image’,

Saussure’s ‘language as a system’ and Althusser’s ‘ideology’.

She draws on Althusser’s concept of ideology to explain how a reader is fixed in a particular ideological position within a text

How a reader is constituted as a subject by a text Analyses Lacan’s theory of mirror image as a

formative of the ‘I’ Adding insights into ‘Resistance’, and‘Desire’ Explains about the complementary relationship

between a reader and a text on lines of subjectivity

Ideology

A set of ideas that determines one’s goals, expectations and actions

The word ‘Ideology’ coined by Destutt de Tracy in 1796 by fusing ‘idea’ and ‘logy’ to mean ‘’science of ideas’’

Marx defined ideology as a range of representations related to the real relationships which people live

Ideology is not simply a set of iluusions

Ideology can’t be defined as a whole truth. It presents partial truths

It is a set of omissions, gaps, rather than lies, appears to provide answers to questions

Ideology has no creators According to Althusser, ideological practises are

produced and reproduced in the institutions of our society – Ideological State Apparatuses, ISA

The Subject

The subject is what speaks or signifies Traditional sense of subject was ego or self Subject represents the individual’s self-consiousness

and consiousness of the self For post-structuralism the subject is rather secondary,

constructed by the language and volatile Language allows an individual to refer to himself as ‘I’

and everyone except him as ‘You’ ‘I’ has a set of beliefs and practices which is at

variance with that of ‘You’

Within ideology the individual speaker is the origin of the meaning of his utterence

According to Derrida language is not aa function of speaking subject

It implies that subject is inscribed in the language, that it is a function of language

Psychoanalysis

Jacques Lacan,eminent French psychoanalyst argues that subjectivity is not acquired, but created

He observes at the age of six, an infant has no sense of identity :it is not able to distinguish itself from others

But between the age of six and eighteen months, children became capable of recognising their mirror image

The subject is not static

After the first stage of recognition, the child enters the ‘symbolic order’

To be a part of social formation, a child must have recourse to language

The child not only identifies itself as ‘I’ , but also as ‘he’ and ‘she’, ‘son’ or ‘daughter’, according to the subject positions it happens to be in

Resistance

Ideology has the role of constituting individuals as subjects, because it is produced in the identification of ‘I’ of language

It is not easy to come out of it To resist ideology means to refuse act or speak Ideology addresses concrete individuals as subjects It may be possible to resist ideology in a theoretical

level with a concept of ruling ideology that is by protesting against it

There is a distinction between the consious subject represented in a speech and the subject speaks

In the gap formed we find unconsious- in the moment of entry into the symbolic order

It is the consiousness which repress human beings in obedience to the discipline imposed by language and culture

Unconsiousness is the only source of disruption of the obedience

Desire

Once the child enters the symbolic order, it overcomes its difficulty in the pre-linguistic stage to vent its wants

The acquisition of lanuage helps him to phrase his desires

Language satisfies the child’s wish to express its desires

It confines the wishes to those that can be expressed through conventions of language

For instance when a child says it wants a rose, the rose it has in mind may be white in colour, though it may get red.

The concept of subject is constantly in the process of construction and deconstruction

Driven by the unconsious desire the subject is restless, dissatisfied and eager to change

This dissatisfaction leads to the possiblity of transformation

The Subject and the Text

A reader in a way author also By interpreting the signs in a text in a personal

fashion every reader creates his own versions of the same literary text

Every reader brings his own aspirations and dreams in the reading of a text

The quality of our literary experience depends not only on the text and on what the author offers

But also depends on the releveance of padt experience and presnet intersets that the reader brings in

o Interpellation A concept used in Marxist theoryExplains how individuals are constructed as

subjects by major social and political institutions

Propounded by Louis Althusser in his Essays on Ideology

No texts create a determinate meaning but by social formation

o Classic RealismThe dominant literary form of the 19th

centurySubjectivity is the major theme of Classic

RealismInconsistency of character or the

inappropriateness of particular actions to particular characters is seen as a weakness of classic realism

Conclusion

Catherine Belsey streches toeards an explicitly philosophical approach to literary theory

She works towards a pluralistic theory of interpretation but her work is not a post modern work

She yokes together linguist theories, psychoanalysis and Marxist philosophy

Explains the interplay between a text, reader and the social formation

She succeede in uniting various disciplines in analysing the literary texts

THANK YOU